Beowulf is the first full length production by Barely Human Puppets, who have made a name for themselves in Brighton for their quirky short shows and beautifully crafted puppets by artistic director Daisy Jordan. It’s an ambitious text to tackle, embedded in Anglo-Saxon artistic convention, not to mention written in an Old English language that […]

Colm Tóibín’s novella, on which this show is based, was published just a few months before this production debuted on Broadway. The show drew protests, angered thousands and closed early. Indeed it’s hard to imagine a performance depicting Mary the Mother of God as a cynic of Jesus’s power ever flourishing in the commercial land […]

Okuni opens with a voice over explaining in clear level tones that Kabuki is the theatre and dance of the avant-garde or bizarre. Then we see a stern male figure in robes, flanked by two younger women: his face is chiselled and still, their faces are mobile and smiling. The stage is set for a […]

Rosana is wearing a magenta-coloured coat, which matches my magenta-coloured skirt and tights. We laugh about this as we walk along hand-in-hand through the streets of Brighton. She asks me what I think people might suppose our relationship to be. I suggest that because we are wearing the same colour, they might think we’re members […]

‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. It seems a clear enough rule by which to live a decent life. But when you start to unpick it, complications sneak in. So it goes through all the propositions put to us, the ‘focus group’, by Simon Wilkinson (playing some version of himself) and his ‘intern’ from Lourdes, Liyuwerk Sheway […]