Category: Reviews

  • Brian Jonestown Massacre: live in Brighton

    4 stars – A tamer, trippier and slightly decadent massacre 35 years on. It’s no secret that Brian Jonestown Massacre (BJM) shows can be a bit of a gamble. In fact, the lead singer, guitarist and founder of the San Francisco psychedelic rock band, Anton Newcombe, has made his unpredictable stage behaviour a substantial part…

  • Vanya is Alive

    4 stars – clever, minimalistic drama Alya stays silent about her son Vanya: Vanya has been sent to the peace. Until one day Alya receives a message from her son’s number, reading: ‘Vanya has not been captured. He is absolutely free’.

  • Down in Colorado

    4 stars – honest and powerful storytelling Gabriel Bird, class 1995, tells the story of the years he spent in Colorado in his original musical storytelling piece. From the first song, we already have a grasp of his dark humour, when with an accelerated, jolly rhythm he describes the setting of his attempted suicide.

  • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka

    It is 1990 and Maali Almeida (‘Photographer. Gambler. Slut.’) is new to his ghost non-body, hovering over his town, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Around his neck hangs the Nikon, now broken, that he’s been using to shoot pictures of the past years of civil war, of the bodies it left behind, often civilians, and of journalists, terrorists…

  • Liz Lawrence: Peanuts tour review

    The 34-year old London-based indie rock/ folk singer/ songwriter Liz Lawrence returns to the road with her fourth studio album, Peanuts. As experimental and genre-subversive as ever, an ‘indie rock’ label isn’t in fact sufficient to describe anymore; the bass is amped up, the rock riffs are catchy, there are elements of funk, pop, sometimes…

  • The Wondrous Conveyance of Stella Estrella 

    A one-woman show in a small black box theater above a Camden pub could hardly be a bad idea for an autumnal evening, no less so given it’s starring the multi-talented LAMDA graduate Kylie Brady. Brady takes it away as an equally talented medium Stella Estrella, as the eighth daughter (her twin sister having died)…

  • Dare la vita, by Michela Murgia

    In this essay-pamphlet, Michela Murgia enters the debate on surrogacy, which has been on the Italian political agenda over the past few years. With the hostility of the present government towards this practice, surrogacy has very recently been declared ‘Universal crime’.

  • Sheol

    5 stars – powerfully unsettling Sheol is the name of the afterworld in ancient Hebrew traditions. According to different textual sources, it has either positive connotations to it, or negative, or neither. A soprano and three musicians are the characters of this performance created by the Grotowski Institute and Katowice Miasto Ogrodów.

  • Inside and Prejudice

    2 stars – engaging but unripe How does a girl from a Pakistani family but born and raised in Scotland see the world? Ifrah Qureshi provides some answers to this question in her solo show, her first attempt at long-form stand-up comedy.

  • 100% My Type on Paper

    3 stars – between reality and… a reality (show) Sammy and Clyde apparently meet for their first date, feeling slightly awkward and embarrassed. Yes, apparently, because it doesn’t take long to understand that they are the protagonists of a reality show: at their next attempt, the Producer appears to tell them how to act and…