In recent years Cork company Gare St Lazare Players has brought the pared-down texts of writers like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to the stage. Last year I was mesmerised by artistic director Conor Lovett’s performance of Beckett’s short story ‘The End’. This was my first experience of Lovett’s intimate style and it made me […]

Freedom is the foundation of fiction and fantasy: a state reachable in our imaginations if nowhere else. The choreographer Jasmin Vardimon invites us into this place and in her programme notes tells us to ‘feel free to imagine’. Yet, in this overcrowded and structurally fragmented piece it can end up feeling like this freedom is […]

My journey through SPILL began on Thursday 1 November, and my first port of call was the SPILL Study Café inside SPILL Central. The space was welcoming, warm and served a lovely cup of tea; it was a good base for the festival. From here I could head up to the Ipswich Art School Gallery […]

  To attempt The Odyssey in any media could never be described as an easy option. The Paper Cinema are a company creating moving pictures out of paper, projected onto a screen – their style is intriguing, engaging and many-layered, and is enhanced by live music. In choosing The Odyssey as their subject matter, it […]

In Shiny Floor Shiny Ceiling Andrew Poppy has created a piece of abstract experimental music theatre described in the programme as: ‘An opera entertainment, 9 songs in search of a territory, 7 voices in search of a song.’ It is more of a concert than a theatrical performance: Poppy provides vocals for much of it, […]