So, what are we all doing when we meet in a theatre space? In a kindly way, Chris Goode, asks us ‘Why have we come? What are we hoping for? What are we dreading?’, and then, cheekily, ‘Are these questions rhetorical?’. The Forest & the Field is a comfortably cosy, immersive piece of non-fiction storytelling. There’s even […]

This is a dream-state, otherworldly imagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream– funny, playful, but possessing the dark urgency of a particularly bizarre dream that embroils the sleeper and occupies their thoughts even upon waking. This is the much-hyped collaboration between Bristol Old Vic’s artistic director Tom Morris and South African Handspring Puppet Company, whose previous partnership War […]

New company Black Fish invite audiences to visit Alaska, a weird and sometimes wonderful environment, inspired by wild North American landscapes, and focusing on one man’s calamitous experiences with them. This is a new company underpinned by the work of an old: both performers and the writer, Carl Grose, are old collaborators with Kneehigh, and […]

The set design of Told by an Idiot’s My Perfect Mind looked clinical and was full of disparate objects: screens, a wind machine, table and chairs, and a thundersheet from which a ramp sloped downwards at an awkward gradient. I immediately drew a blank: how would these things come together coherently? The smooth hessian or […]

At first Franko B’s new work Because of Love – Volume 1 appears as resolutely non-theatrical as his previous offerings. Incorporating an uncompromisingly opaque mise-en-scene and sections of unblinking repetition that lead nowhere, it very politely puts both fingers up at the proscenium arch that surrounds it. Yet it also weaves a story through our subconscious through […]