‘You’re in safe hands’ says Bryony Kimmings, towards the start of the show. She makes a joke of it – she does this for a living, she’s got insurance, she’s DBS police-checked – but the truth is, we are safe, and she is safe. Because despite everything – the intense autobiographical material, the recounting of […]

  So who remembers Houseparty? Daytime TV show from the 1970s, reality TV before reality TV existed, fly-on-the-wall kind of thing, ahead of its time. Featuring a  group of friends (‘housewives’) gathered round a table talking about – whatever. Often with cooking. Well, Xavier de Sousa’s Post is a bit like that, except that the people gathered […]

The End of the World. A state of mind, a song by – come on, who, who? Name that tune! It’s Skeeter Davis, a country-pop classic from 1962. You’d know it if you heard it. You’d know it even if the version you were hearing was slowed-down, then slowed-down again, and slowed-down thrice so it […]

Sleepwalk Collective’s latest work, Kourtney Kardashian, is the third part of what the company describe as an ‘accidental trilogy’ which is inspired, in part, by Chekov’s Three Sisters. I haven’t seen the other two parts, a ballet called Kim Kardashian (2016), and a ‘stage play’ called Khloe Kardashian (2017). I am also a bit vague […]

In 2016 self-styled ‘guerilla folk opera’ Counting Sheep took Edinburgh Fringe by storm, as it invited audiences to immerse themselves in a passionately evoked music-driven staging of a revolution. Toronto-based Lemon Bucket Orkestra re-cast the personal experiences of their part-Ukrainian musician Mark Marczyk into vibrant folk form. Marczyk had found himself in the midst of […]