Ah, the lure of the silver screen! Close Up starts with slow motion, Black and white film of diving and tumbling bodies, enormous limbs and torsos travelling across the large screen to the rear of the performance space, which is set up dance-style at floor level – no staging, tiered seats rising up on three […]

This show certainly does feature some big marionettes: a virtually life-sized Giraffe, an Elephant, and a Lion. The Elephant is actually slightly under life-size and the Lion slightly over, which caused me some inclination to quibble, but they are big and impressive nonetheless. Indeed, the whole visual aspect of the show is well conceived with […]

The politics of gender – and specifically transgender issues – are a hot potato right now. There’s a lot of media attention on high-profile transgender women – Caitlyn, Kellie – with endless interviews, articles, speculations and pronouncements from the women themselves and from their family, friends and enemies. Meanwhile, within the tight enclaves of radical […]

In which performance artist Bryony Kimmings is joined by her advertising accounts manager boyfriend Tim Grayburn in the creation of a show exploring his clinical depression, her response to this, and their decision to face it together as they move forward as a couple, now expecting their first child. On one level, there’s not much […]

Welcome to Massiveville, which is in fact a small town populated by puppets. It has a local shop selling overpriced vegetables, a pub, a cottage hospital, and a recreational ground where young people take drugs and make out. Its puppet population includes old codger Howard, whiny middle-class teenager Suki who is like so sick of […]