Combining well-paced physical humour with accomplished live musical performance, Mr Honk and His Sad Trombone is an entertaining show, perfectly pitched at its audience of young children and accompanying adults. Mr Honk, a quirky character who enjoys a challenge, is desperate to join his local brass band, but the grumpy trombone that he purchases from a disreputable-looking […]

Directed and written by Tarek Iskander, deputy artistic director of pop-up venue The Yard and an artist whose previous Shakespeare productions have received critical acclaim, Shiver is an epilogue to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set twelve years after the events of the original play. Using lines abstracted from the original, but featuring only the characters of Miranda and Prospero,Shiver explores […]

Embracing the finesse of language, spoken word artist Inua Ellams’ autobiographical The 14th Tale intends to thwart audience expectations of ‘the young black male in London’ with an intricate look at a young man embracing a mischievous side which notoriously runs in his family. Produced by Fuel, The 14th Tale made its debut back in 2009 at the Arcola […]

I have an in-built suspicion of young companies who suddenly become darlings of the critics and the theatre-pundits. Action Hero is one such, and though I enjoyed their previous production, A Western, I couldn’t compute the measure to which it overwhelmed many who saw it. So I was pleased to find myself engaging far more with Watch […]

Five athletic dancers scuttle and shift across a grey stage. Ticks and jerks punctuate their otherwise fluid movement, hands caress feet and bodies block one another. In Jean Abreu’s vision of prison an incarcerated man is akin to a butterfly pinned in a display box. Inside is inspired by the idea that a society’s jails are […]