A theatre show about boys playing basketball: I’m not drawn to the subject, but I like  previous work by performance poet and writer Inua Ellams and physical theatre director Benji Reid (who haven’t to my knowledge previously collaborated), and I’m interested to see what they’ll do together. I leave the theatre on a high, delighted […]

It’s 8.30pm on a cool and breezy, but thankfully dry, evening in April. A crowd is gathering in the grounds of Shaw House in Berkshire. The house itself is an Elizabethan mansion, providing a moody backdrop to the cluster of structures standing in the gardens. Furthest away from the house is a grouping of tall […]

Coney’s Early Days (of a better nation) –  inspired by the 2011 UK riots, the Arab spring, Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution, and the rise (and fall) of Occupy – is set in a TV studio/balloting station/European Congress meeting hall and it is participatory.  Coney propose ‘to put the audience at the heart of their work’; ‘to […]

Running hot on the heals of Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört (On the Mountain A Cry Was Heard), also at Sadler’s Wells, Ahnen continues Tanztheatre Wuppertal’s revivals of the lesser seen pieces from their repertoire of works choreographed by the late Pina Bausch. This appears to be the principle strategy as they […]

On the way out of this show I was fortunate enough to meet a French woman who greatly appreciated the talents of the lead actor Tchéky Karyo (star of many films by Luc Bresson, as well as TV show The Missing) – who, she told me, delivered the beautifully written poetry with passion and power. As […]