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3 days ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
Listen very carefully, for I will say this only once: taped to the bottom of the device where you are reading this is a tiny box. Inside the box is a microfilm containing my review of The Comedy About Spies… There are enemies everywhere who would love to get their hands on this sensitive information.
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1 week ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
This perennial favourite returns to Bankside with a young cast headed by Lola Shalam and Rawaed Asde as the ill-fated teenagers. It’s probably the best-known work of Shakespeare but, thanks to a trio of welcome touches from director Sean Holmes, it arrives on the Bankside somewhat refreshed. The first major change is the setting. Goodbye Italy, hello the frontier town of Verona. The set is sturdy and simple enough, with all the action happening in front of the wooden façade of a saloon.
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1 week ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
Walking into Giant at the Harold Pinter Theatre, I expected a nuanced exploration of an author – Roald Dahl – defending himself against accusations of antisemitism and perhaps earning redemption. I didn’t know the full story. I hadn’t read the article, and I hadn’t researched what he’d said. I went in hoping, perhaps foolishly, that there would be another side to the narrative. What I found was something far more challenging – and far more affecting.
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1 week ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
Just go and see it. Wait… I need to write more than that? Ok… This play is one of the most important works of our time. You’ll laugh, you may cry, you will be forever changed by the experience. Just go and see it. What’s that? You need even more? You got any quarters?
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3 weeks ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
The London Coliseum is home to the biggest stage in London, making it the perfect setting for The Great Gatsby – A New Musical, a show filled with grand design and gorgeous visuals. But, did Gatsby’s glittering parties and decadent sets make the most of such a vast performance space? Short answer: almost. Long answer: buckle up…This Gatsby adaptation is ambitious. Visually, it’s spectacular.
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3 weeks ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
You know that feeling when something hits you right in the feels, leaving you blown away, but desperate to talk about it at the same time? That’s Sunny Side by Northern Rascals. Contemporary dance meets spoken word in this raw, beautiful exploration of men’s mental health: where pain, loneliness, and frustration spill out through movement and poetry. It’s powerful stuff: quietly devastating, yet hopeful. If you’ve ever struggled to find the right words, this show speaks volumes.
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1 month ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
Arriving at The Vaults for Plied & Prejudice, we were ushered into the Pemberley Pleasure Gardens – a delightfully low-budget cartoon of Regency grandeur. There were stretchy wall coverings printed with vines and fountains , pink tracksuits cleverly styled to pass as period wear (great work by Penny Challen with the gloriously kitsch set and costume design), and violinists playing Bridgerton-style covers of Beyoncé.
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1 month ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
Sabrage is the French word for opening a bottle of champagne with a sword! It’s also a kickass name for the new cabaret show by renowned director Scott Maidment, and it’s just hit Lafayette King’s Cross. I was lucky enough to check it out the other night… here’s what went down!Arriving at Lafayette, we were immediately whisked into the gorgeous Nola’s bar for pre-show cocktails.
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1 month ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
When I read the marketing copy for Puppy, which starts, “Two young women meet late one night in a car park and immediately fall in love… while dogging” I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Naomi Westerman, the writer, is a good friend of a good friend, and as I always endeavour to support queer theatre, I figured I’d go and see it, hoping it would be good enough to congratulate them afterwards and actually mean it. I’d never been to The King’s Head Theatre in Islington before.
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1 month ago | 
1883magazine.com | Nick Barr
Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. Until 2018, that was all most of us knew about the six wives of Henry VIII – well, that and maybe some of their names. That all changed when two students, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, decided to write a musical about them, showing them as three-dimensional, real women, trapped by a man who had little regard for them other than as breeding stock.
