A footloose and fancy free woman is seen in a succession of dreamscape settings. She climbs the walls of abandoned buildings, enters empty apartments, and finds herself immersed in other people’s stories – acting out snippets of lives that are not her own. She is a kleptomaniac time traveller, moving through time and space with […]

Part physical theatre performance, part involuntary group therapy, The Birth of Death starts incrementally, with a ringing sound. Joanne Tremarco is in amongst us, sounding a bowl and asking if we can still hear the peal. It’s an evocative start, a strong metaphor, though the moment goes on far beyond its relevance. Of course, the […]

In contemporary conversation, gender is increasingly understood as a performance, the response to social conditioning and a mask that can shape or even overwhelm the individual. The PappyShow’s celebration of contemporary maleness, Boys, joyfully embodies the opposite point of view. A romping ensemble piece with a cast of thirteen, the show sets out to explode narrow […]

As we enter the space we see a girl and a gorilla sitting on the floor, on one of those compact circular dancefloors that are like a little circus ring. They are sat there a fair while, on display. The audience mostly chatter, although some of us sit silently, staring. There’s a lot of noise […]

  Lisa Wolfe and her trusty sidekick Peter Chrisp have been to see Spymonkey’s Cooped. Lots of times. So how has it fared, twenty years on? This year Spymonkey celebrated their 20th anniversary with a revival of their most widely seen show, Cooped. We fell in love with Cooped when we first saw it at […]