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3 days ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
The world often seems to demand that women seek permission for almost everything they do. Hunia Chawla’s play explores this theme through the experience and resistance of the young woman Hanna (Anisa Butt), taking her from Pakistan to student life in London. It is told from the point of view of women, this being emphasised by the male characters being simply voice-overs.
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6 days ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
The Freedom Theatre of Jenin has long toured Palestinian communities, dramatising their experiences and becoming a regular target of Israeli harassment. In April, its producer and general manager, Mustafa Sheta, was released from 16 months of administrative detention. Micaela Miranda, the director of Return to Palestine, reported to the audience that Jenin “has been under intensified Israeli military occupation for over 127 days… all 20,000 residents have been forcibly displaced and...
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1 week ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
The world seems short of ideas on an alternative future for Gaza. Israel, with American support, seems so obsessed with killing Palestinians that they haven’t had time to think outside the box, so Ahmed Masoud has come up with a satirical, imagined future in his dramatisation of a short story he wrote in 2018.
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1 week ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
The early years of the 19th century were a dangerous time for a radical. Those who argued for democracy or social change faced heavy surveillance, physical violence and prison. Richard Bradbury’s play Regarding Shelley lets us glimpse, with a confident cast, what happens when the poet and essayist Percy Bysshe Shelley falls foul of the oppressive state. It opens with his friend Dan (Charlie Maguire) urging him to leave Ireland, where he supported the local rebellion.
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2 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Those who run society have often mobilised scapegoats to distract dissent from themselves and increase their power. Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee terrified many in America in the 1950s by hunting down so-called communists. It was likened to the “witch hunts” of previous periods and prompted Arthur Miller to write about the vicious absurdity of the Salem witch-hunts of 1692 in his classic play The Crucible.
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2 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
A sixteen-foot-high metal horse sculpture stood for ten years at a prominent Jenin roundabout in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine. It was celebrated locally and praised internationally. In September 2023, an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) bulldozer scooped up the statue and carried it off to be destroyed. Like many colonial invaders, it wasn’t enough for Israel to continuously remove or kill the indigenous people; they had to also erase their culture.
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2 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Most of what we hear about incel groups is disturbingly anti-female. Such stuff discourages us from looking beyond our objections to the variations in the way 'involuntary celibates', incels, express themselves and the issues and even suffering that lies behind their behaviour. The satirical play The Last Incel doesn't shy away from making clear its opposition to such groups, but it does so in a way that lets us glimpse the underlying vulnerabilities of such men.
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3 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
History has mostly been written from the point of view of powerful men, the owners of property and wealth. Ava Pickett instead centres her prizewinning play 1536 on three women who meet and talk by a tree outside a village some way from London. Anna (Siena Kelly), the most sexually adventurous of the three, is proud that men find her incredibly attractive.
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1 month ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
The Gang of Three takes us to 1972, 1976 and 1980, when leading members of the right wing of the Labour Party are amiably chatting about their interest in who might become leader or deputy leader of the party. They are not only competing with other right-wingers but also with “a case of galloping Marxism.” The actors give strong, convincing performances on a minimal set.
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1 month ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Britain has good tastes. Its museums and stately homes are full of important cultural objects it has pillaged from across the globe. In fourteen scenes, Joel Tan’s exciting and entertaining play lets us glimpse the imagined repatriation of one of these objects from the British Museum to a special spot in China that reflects the current power relations in that country.
