Visual theatre, you say? Here it is in shed-loads: the awesome Opus 7 – created by Russian designer-director Dmitry Krymov and a team of performer-devisers and co-designers – is truly epic, and takes up every inch of the Brighton Corn Exchange with cardboard, paint, a football game, a giant puppet (she’d be ceiling height in most venues, […]

Matt Rudkin’s Happy Clap Trap variety night was winkled out from its familiar tiny stage at Brighton’s Marlborough Theatre for a one-off festival special at the Spiegeltent. The audience was rather scattered around the space; the Mayor and her entourage hiding in a back booth. A wise decision, given the over-enthusiastic antics of Moth-woman (Sarah […]

‘No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.’ Three young people negotiate the urban environment. A man in a red hoodie rolls across the ground (‘Like the rolling saint of India!’ says my companion). A woman with strawberry-blonde plaits scales the wall […]

The Hive, from fledgling company Human Zoo, takes its lead from the dystopian fantasies of Huxley and Orwell. The Hive is the last subterranean bastion of human kind, the world above poisoned by war and conflict. Guided by the system controller’s desire to avoid conflict, each individual lives alone in an 8’ x 8’ ‘cell’, […]

At its best the work of Hofesh Shechter, director of this year’s Brighton Festival, can feel almost shamanistic – an overwhelming spectacle of pounding sounds, visceral movement and visuals. When I saw 2012’s Political Mother as part of last year’s Derry City of Culture programme, the arena was set up for a gig and hundreds […]