-
6 days ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
In March this year, the United Nations released its "State of the Global Climate report." It notes that, “globally, each of the last ten years has been one of the ten hottest years on record.” The consequences of that are terrifying.
-
6 days ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
As women marched the streets demanding the right to vote in 1879, Ibsen outraged society by writing the play A Doll's House in which its central character, Nora, walks out on her husband and doesn't follow the pattern of much nineteenth-century literature of women rebelling and then dying at the end of the story. Some wanted it banned. Others said Ibsen had gone too far and should have a sequel in which Nora returns and looks after her children like a good wife.
-
2 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
What Fresh Hell Is It? takes an always amusing two-hour dive into the very quotable, witty writing of the American Dorothy Parker The monologue, written and directed by Glenn T Griffin, opens with her waking on the sofa. There are bottles of alcohol scattered about the room, and she immediately starts drinking as she speaks in a gloomy, perhaps hungover mood. She tells us "I like to have a Martini, two at the very most.
-
2 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
James McDermott’s play Jab, set in the difficult days of COVID, lets us glimpse in seventy scenes over seventy-five minutes the pandemic period, exaggerating the tensions in the relationship of the married couple Anne and Don.
-
3 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Summoning Sondheim has a purpose. Grace and Jordana tell us, “theatre is dying… (so) we’ll save musical theatre and therefore the world by bringing back Sondheim.” They point out that part of the problem is the theatre’s neglect of women writers of musicals. A voiceover notes the tiny number of Tony and Oliver awards given to women writers of musicals.
-
4 weeks ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Azuka Oforka writes in the show’s programme about visiting Llanrumney Hall in Cardiff, “the supposed birthplace of Captain Henry Morgan”. The caption beneath his “grand portrait” read “Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica 1636–1688.” Nowhere did it mention that he was a pirate who looted other countries and his own troops, owned a plantation of slaves and was responsible for keeping Jamaica a safe place for the brutal continuation of the slave trade.
-
1 month ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Simon Stephens nudges Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1972 play Men’s Business through the nihilistic gloom of 'in-yer-face theatre' to produce what might have been a satiric five-minute sex comedy set in the back of a butcher’s shop.
-
1 month ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Caryl Churchill's fifteen-minute play Seven Jewish Children filmed by Omri Dayan carries us across continents and a hundred years in seven scenes depicting different Jewish adult families talking about what they should say to a young daughter during a moment of upheaval in their lives, from a 1903 pogrom in Russia to Tel Aviv during a time of conflict in 2009.
-
1 month ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
Nikil Vyas’s The Mosinee Project takes a theatrical look at an unusual pageant that took place in the small town of Mosinee in Wisconsin on May Day 1950, a time when America was whipped into a panic by a red scare claiming communism was threatening to conquer them.
-
1 month ago | 
britishtheatreguide.info | Keith P. McKenna |Keith J. Mckenna
The results of the survey of young people aged 16–17 in England carried out by Censuswide at the end of 2021 should not have surprised anyone. Despite the government making it mandatory for relationships and sex education (RSE) in secondary schools and relationships education in primary schools, the pupils didn't seem impressed. Only a third rated the RSE as good, while 22% rated it as bad. The accounts of opportunities for pupils to feedback on their feelings were even worse.
