Spanish flamenco guitars, African koras and kalimbas, and Afro-Venezuelan tambores. Loose-limbed Senegalese dancers, legendary Sevillian singers, verbatim voice-overs about migration, and compás clapping in counter-rhythm to the djembe beats. Quimeras is indeed a strange beast, created by Paco Peña in collaboration with various Spanish, South American, and African dancers and musicians. The core of the […]

A newcomer to Brighton’s range of intimate spaces for intimate theatre, The Dukebox nestles at the back of the Iron Duke pub and is a good setting for Dan R Martin’s text-based two-hander. Billed as a black comedy about manic depression, The Black Dog and Other Influences is a fast-paced exchange of ideas, scenarios and […]

  A backdrop of jarred and splintered wood, set at odd angles across the back wall, and a thin gravel path leading to a gathering of dustbins at the side of the stage evokes the backstreets of Cape Town in the studio of the Oval House Theatre. The lights come up on Mamela Nyamza, who […]

In recent years Cork company Gare St Lazare Players has brought the pared-down texts of writers like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to the stage. Last year I was mesmerised by artistic director Conor Lovett’s performance of Beckett’s short story ‘The End’. This was my first experience of Lovett’s intimate style and it made me […]

Freedom is the foundation of fiction and fantasy: a state reachable in our imaginations if nowhere else. The choreographer Jasmin Vardimon invites us into this place and in her programme notes tells us to ‘feel free to imagine’. Yet, in this overcrowded and structurally fragmented piece it can end up feeling like this freedom is […]