Category: Theatre
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5 – irresistible, masterfully crafted Commedia The mission is as simple as impossible: to trace the history of Commedia dell’Arte in 50 minutes. One of the actors is desperate to start, but the other two don’t seem willing to collaborate… The down-to-Earth humour typical of the Commedia is extended beyond its boundaries, in a playfulness…
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4 stars – irony and high stakes Julia and Dan are splitting up, and every day they step into the divorce office and sit next to their lawyers, Samantha and Katherine. New details of their story emerge through each dialogue, together with hints about how their relationships have evolved in time.
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2 stars – cool experiment, but… The fear that AI will replace human work and ‘natural intelligence’ is slithering in a growing number of fields. In honour to this, Fiasco Jones from Boilingfrogs company tried to write a romcom with AI, counting on the predictability of the genre and on recurrent similar scenes. The result…
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1 star – dead start to finish. Unfortunately it is sometimes the worst shows that demonstrate the art and craft of great theatre better than the good ones. Thirty seconds into Dead End and you immediately realise that nothing on stage is effortless and simply provided by gods as the lights go off. This play…
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4 stars – a lighthearted but well captured portrait of an all-girls houseshare. Three housemates (and close friends) in their 20s are hosting a birthday party for one of them, when the birthday girl’s new situationship-about-to-have-the-talk shows up and turns the night around. Accommo-dating, a short and sweet one-act play managed to be clever, funny,…
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4 stars – plush feminist comedy Under a plush blanket, on plush pillows and next to a plush book, Riah Knight is sleeping. From the start, she engages the audience with great energy – even a very small and shy audience as was the case when I saw the show. Starting on a playful, amusing…
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4 stars – impeccable acting Matteo and Reggie are stuck into a loop, or straightaway in an absence of time, with the only endless task of carpentering their own coffins. Their opposite personalities lead them to small fights and to hilarious disputes. Matteo catches a grasp of their situation and looks for ways to escape,…
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3 stars – an entertaining improvised comedy hour with varying levels of performance. A 60-minute longform improv show is a tough task to master even for a very well-versed ensemble of some of the funniest quick-thinkers who can read just about any room. With three heroes, a dungeon but no dragons, Mistakes Were Made provided…
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5 stars – I text therefore I am (therefore I love) After meeting in unpredictable circumstances, two students start texting. One is reading Humanities and living his sexuality in a free way; the other is a physicist who acts like he is in control of everything in his life. The differences between them are abysmal…
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4 stars – but very close to 5! In this comedy, Lairs and May could be each other’s nemesis, but they develop a (not-so-balanced) friendship. Lairs is a Chinese student who stems from a rich family and has just moved to London. May is a sound, practical person, she looks Asian but was born in…
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