It’s a classic start: an empty stage, a shrouded grand piano, a low-hanging chandelier, a flurry from behind the curtains. The long, lanky, ginger-haired form of Thomas Monckton pops out briefly – a flurry of face-powder and flicked coat-tails – then disappears behind the blacks. Puppet-esque forms take shape, morph and dissolve. Eventually, the eponymous […]

Ah, a room full of junk furniture and cardboard boxes, and we are allowed – encouraged, even – to wander around and rummage. All of this waiting for us! How exciting! I open one. It’s full of green polystyrene balls – packaging – and at the bottom is a pen, and a provocation: What was […]

The lost or stolen shadow – or the shadow that takes charge of its own destiny – is a common theme in fairy tales, perhaps most famously explored in the Hans Christian Andersen short story ‘The Shadow’. In Malasombra, Spanish company Auments use the obvious (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing) device of shadow […]

Work, work, work. Never stopping, fighting to meet the productivity deadlines… That’s all there is – that and a fitful night’s sleep, dreaming terrible dreams, until it is time to get up and get back on the treadmill. That is the sum of a working man’s life. Surrounded on three sides by audience, a lone […]

Kiln (formerly Kindle Theatre) are making great strides in experimentation with sound and vocal scores and the vision is potentially terrific. It takes time to ferment the fulfilment of the vision and maybe the Edinburgh run for these two shows is too exposing and too soon. Both shows come with haunting vocal scores. Aspiring music […]