Where on earth is Hamlet?

"The battle rages on. By lamp-light. At high speed. With a 3am kebab. With Steven Berkoff. Farce turns to horror. In a caravan. Haunted by a pigeon."

This year's Edinburgh Fringe programme condensed, continued over on Exeunt.

In The Heights, Southwark Playhouse

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, a multiple Tony-winner which opened on Broadway back in 2008, is a large-hearted affair. Set in New York’s Washington Heights, a neighbourhood with a large Latin American population, it charts the stories of a number of characters, different generations of immigrants and their American-born offspring – money worries, family strife, love both requited and not – over a number of sticky city nights.

There’s a gentleness to all this, a sense of affection. The harsher side of urban life is not up for dissection here; despite the heatwave, this isn’t Do The Right Thing. Miranda is keener to explore the way immigrant communities work, the interconnectedness, the support network; this is undercut only by the poignant feeling that ever-rising rents will soon start to have an impact on this way of life, diluting things, forcing people to move out and apart.

Luke Sheppard’s London production captures the show’s energy, its capacity for uplift. It’s a deliciously vibrant production, the stage an arena for Drew McOnie’s often dizzying choreography. The music meanwhile is a mix of Latin sounds and hip-hop influences. The lyrics are consistently smart and funny, even if the sound quality means that some of the zippier lines get lost.

The performances are nicely judged, giving necessary shape to a large cast of characters, some drawn in marker pen, others in fine-liner. The heart of the piece is provided by Sam MacKay as the good-natured bodega-owner Usnavi, a decent guy who feels a little adrift following the death of his parents. Not that he’s lacking in family, the production makes clear, not with Eve Polycarpou’s Abuela Claudia and Damian Buhagiar’s mouthy young Sonny living nearby. Everyone looks out for one another in this neighbourhood; book-writer Quiara Alegria Hudes makes it clear that this comes at the cost of privacy – everyone knows each other’s business too and a girl can’t drop out of university without everyone soon finding out about it – but the production, in the main, is a celebration of community.

The set, a mix graffiti tags and corrugated metal, is relegated to the back wall, so that Sheppard and McOnie can fill the Southwark Playhouse stage with popping bodies and twirling skirts. There are a couple of stand-out sequences – the dramatic double of ‘The Club’ and ‘Blackout’ which ends the first act among them – but the production as a whole has a cumulative cheering effect, drawing the audience in, lifting them up.

Admittedly there’s not a huge amount of room for nuance when it comes to character though David Bedella does a good job of conveying paternal turmoil, as a hard-working man determined to do well by his family. That’s not to say the production is without emotional texture; while the plotting is predictable – Usnavi’s sold one of his customers a winning lottery, where might this be leading? – and there are few hard edges of which to speak, the tone is rarely cloying and a couple of moments are genuinely and unexpectedly moving in their exploration of what it is to move to another country in search of a better life, to leave one family behind only to find another.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Secret Cinema 21

After attempting something slightly different with their not so secret tie-in with Wes Anderson’s newly released The Grand Budapest Hotel – discussed in more detail here – the Secret Cinema team have pitched back into the black for their latest event.

The air of mystery is obviously a huge part of the process, the seeding of clues on social media – in this case a few evocative quotes and some details about an American mayoral campaign – is a key part of the experience. Once you’ve acquired your ticket, you’re assigned a ‘character’ and are told the location and given the dress code for the evening, but they still keep it zipped when it comes to the name of the film. While there’s much fun to be had in trying to unpick all this, there’s also the pressing question of what happens if the film turns out to be one you don’t like? Will it still be an experience worth having? A willingness to gamble certainly comes in handy (in more than one way, it turns out).

They’ve been doing this for a good few years now, tweaking things along the way but the concept remains the same. You’re buying a ticket not just to see a mystery film, but to participate in an immersive experience inspired, both directly and indirectly, by the world of that film. They’ve done Blade Runner and The Shawshank Redemption in the past, while recent experiences have been based on The Third Man and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; for the latter a vast disused office building in Croydon was transformed into the headquarters of a shadowy corporation but the results received quite a mixed response from audiences, the chief complaints being that the space was just too large and the cinema part of the experience – the screening of the film itself, on a series of small television monitors and projected on the side of the building – felt like an afterthought.

It looks like they’ve taken at least some of the audience feedback on board. Secret Cinema 21 seems more manageable in scale than their take on Brazil. You have the best part of two hours to explore the space before the screening, with time for further carousing afterwards. It helps that they’ve snagged a peach of a building for this one, a beautiful historic venue with its own array of secrets. They’ve also sourced some gorgeous things with which to furnish it and the whole space is attractively wreathed in whisky mist. But while it’s tempting to make comparisons, this isn’t Punchdrunk and the level of detail isn’t quite up to their standards, you soon start to spot the duct tape covering up wires, the cheap paper table cloths, the fact that the dollars have clearly been printed by photocopier. Small details, but ones capable of pulling you out of the world. Some of the rooms are dazzling, particularly those which made the most out of the building’s original art deco features and the grand central staircase, others feel a bit empty.

While Secret Cinema don’t really market what they do as being ‘immersive’ theatre in the conventional sense, the performance element is fairly central to the experience. You are given identities and tasks are assigned on arrival, usually involving tracking down various characters to squeeze them for ‘information.’ This has the effect of making you explore the space fully, racing up stairs and into basement drinking dens, sidling up to people by the roulette table, but I would definitely have appreciated a greater degree of narrative clarity, a bit more in the way of incentive; there didn’t seem to be much at stake over whether or not you completed these tasks, apart from the acquisition of more photocopier dollars.

Whereas Punchdrunk at its most enchanting feels like entering a dream world, it’s essentially a solitary experience, with the other masked figures (and their pointy elbows) part of the alien landscape, Secret Cinema is altogether more social. I took a friend, the Lawyer, who fully embraced the role-playing potential (particularly the double-dealing and bribery, the thrill of the grift), testing the interactive elements to the full. Some of the performers seemed more than capable of rolling with this, creating defined characters and having a lot of fun with it, while others seemed far less capable of keeping track of all the various micro-narratives they’d set in motion. I found myself feeling particularly frustrated when we’d finally completed our given task only to be dismissed with a hardboiled shrug. This was a recurring theme. Sure, this was in keeping with the world of the film, and made sense in that context, but it became grating after a while, repeatedly being told to ‘get lost’ or some such in a honey-thick American drawl. It also had the effect of shutting down my willingness to play.

The film turned out to be one I’ve always liked and the band and the dancing that followed was hugely enjoyable, but I found some of the interactive elements frustratingly undercooked and there was a creeping feeling of negativity that sucked the fun out of some exchanges. As an exercise in dress-up and play-acting for grown-ups, one liberally lubricated by booze – a temporary act of escape – it has a lot going for it, but I think I would have felt far more kindly disposed towards it, flaws and all, if it hadn’t felt so grasping.

This is my main problem with this incarnation of Secret Cinema. It’s currently priced in line with Punchdrunk (them again, sorry) but that’s just the start. Once inside there are numerous opportunities to part you with your green – not just bars and ‘diners’ but photographers too. The mark ups are pretty eye-watering, cocktails are OK, but £4 for a small can of warmish beer is a rip-off whichever way you paint it. The level of detail shown elsewhere seemed conspicuous by its absence too, cheap wine in cheap wine glasses at high prices, olives in plastic pots – perhaps if they’d been presented in an era-appropriate manner, if there’d been a bit more love and a little less grab, these niggles would have niggled less but as it was I became more aware of the cracks – the shoddy state of the ladies’ loos, the cloakroom attendants who seemed supremely pissed off at having to deal with wet umbrellas – than I might otherwise have been.

I had a grand time with my Lawyer, once we found each other – they have a tendency to split groups up on arrival – but a lot of that was down to how we chose to engage with it. On watching the film it was also possible to fully appreciate the little jokes, references and clues laced through what had gone before, how cleverly they’d built on tiny details and sub-sub-plots in the source material to create the world in which we’d just been playing, but this came a bit too late and didn’t quite make up for the sense of being squeezed.

Written for Exeunt

Orpheus, Battersea Arts Centre

Little Bulb Theatre’s enchanting reworking of the Orpheus myth returns to the Grand Hall at Battersea Arts Centre and if anything it’s even more magical on second viewing.

It’s a delicious thing, this show. Frankly, given the amazing space they’ve been given to play in and the proven appeal of many of the ingredients they’ve chosen to play with, it would be a surprise if it were otherwise. But that’s not to diminish Littlle Bulb’s invention and skill. Much like in a Wes Anderson film there are boxes within boxes, frames within frames, to their handling of the narrative. The story of Orpheus is told in the style of 1930s Parisian cabaret, with the Great Hall bedecked with red velvet and an array of tables in front of the stage behind which sit more conventional raked seating. The lovers are portrayed by legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt and an Édith Piaf-alike chanteuse Yvette Pépin as played by Little Bulb’s Dominic Conway and Eugenie Pastor. While Conway’s Orpheus remains mute, a calm, smiling presence, his guitar speaking for him, the angular Pastor purrs and smoulders as Piaf/Pepin/Eurydice, rolling her words around, revelling in the undulations of her accent.

Much of the storytelling takes the form of a series of mime sequences and tableaux performed against a backdrop of Debussy and silent movie style-captions. The cast don bunny ears and buck teeth to play woodland creatures or drape and cape themselves in white to play the denizens of the underworld. The dancing is intentionally heavy-footed, and there’s an air of polished amateurishness to the whole enterprise which is mostly pitched at just the right level to render it endearing rather than overly arch. The musicianship as ever is exemplary, but then that’s something of a given with these guys.

Alexander Scott’s production has some truly dazzling moments, particularly in the second half. The song ‘La Chanson de Perséphone’ performed by Tom Penn in male falsetto reminiscent of Anthony and the Johnsons is genuinely haunting, the deployment of the Grand Hall’s mighty organ remains an incredible, reverberative treat, and the climactic sequence – Orpheus and Eurydice’s last desperate dash towards the light – has the audience holding their breath.

While the staging on the whole feels slightly tighter than it did first time around, there are some issues with the lengthy ‘jazz’ interval. While the audience are encouraged to come and go as they wish while the band plays on, few did, and the resulting drag threatens to, if not quite break, than at least dent the production’s spell. This isn’t Little Bulb’s most ambitious show – it doesn’t have the delicacy or the heart-knotting quality of Crocosmia or the divisive alien energy of Squally Showers - it’s a romantic response to an incredible space, a confection, albeit an exquisite one – but taken as an experience in itself, as a night of music and magic and fizz and copious, warm-hearted charm, it’s vastly entertaining and intensely happy-making.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Fatal Attraction, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction was a pretty nasty piece of a film-making, but a coldly efficient one; it set out to hit nerves and it succeeded. The character of Alex, as played by Glenn Close, single, childless, superficially confident but deeply needy, tactical self-harmer, a wrecker of homes and a boiler of bunnies, was written to put the fear of god into men of a certain age, and it worked, speaking to the social anxieties of the time and becoming the highest grossing film of 1987 in the process.

And now it’s here in the West End. Not an update, not even an adaptation really. Just the screenplay served up on stage. Very, very little has been done to address how the material might work in a theatrical setting. The biggest change by far is the reinstatement of writer James Dearden’s original ending. Alex was supposed to kill herself at the end of the movie, implicating Michael Douglas’ philandering New York lawyer Dan in her death. It was downbeat, bleak, made much more sense from a psychological perspective (at least within the universe of the movie), and – famously – went down like a lead balloon with audiences during test screenings. So a new ending was shot, in which Anne Archer’s betrayed wife got to blow the bitch away in the bathtub, although evidently neither Lyne nor Dearden were ever particularly pleased with it.

Given all that, it’s possible to see why Dearden might want to revisit the material, if rather harder to grasp what might be in it for anyone else. And because it follows the film so closely (up until the end at least), it’s impossible not to play the scene-by-scene comparison game and to find Trevor Nunn’s stage version wanting. For one thing, the attraction – kind of a crucial element – is pretty much absent. The early flirtation between Mark Bazeley’s Dan and Natascha McElhone’s striking, stylish business woman, Alex, is one of the better realised scenes, but it still doesn’t suggest the kind of heat that would make Dan risk so much so quickly. There’s also very little sex, bar a bit of heavy petting in an elevator: there’s no sweaty bed-sheet action, Bazeley doesn’t get to do that awkward trouser dance round Alex’s glamorous Manhattan loft and her kitchen sink, perhaps mercifully, remains buttock-free

The production is also curiously difficult to locate in time. A decision has clearly been taken not to set the thing in the 1980s. No-one sports a poodle perm, no one smokes, and the clothes are contemporary. But it’s a very odd kind of update. There are a couple of references to email and even one mention of Facebook, but no one has an iPad, no one sends a text, even the iPhones have the tinny rings of much older mobiles. Hardly any attempt has been made to explore the role the internet might play in Alex’s insertion of herself into Dan’s life – the one thing that might have given this production an edge of interest, instead it inhabits a sort of weird half-way space, a feeling only enhanced by the fact the characters spend so much time on the phone, calling – or failing to call – one another, having bitty, broken conversations while standing on opposite sides of the stage.

And then there’s the sexual politics. Obviously extramarital affairs were not the preserve of the 1980s, and the film was pretty ugly and reactionary even for its time, but it was reflective of a certain social, urban unease. Here, again, the production doesn’t quite seem to know where to put itself. “Girls like sex as much as boys,” Dan’s sweaty-palmed and recently divorced friend excitedly informs him, as if Sex and the City had never happened (though for all Kristin Davis’s Beth gets to do, it may as well not have done). The suggestion that Alex’s age and childlessness, coupled with the trauma of a past miscarriage, might be the root of her unbalanced behaviour – which is if anything emphasised here – is pretty dizzyingly offensive, regardless of when it’s supposed to be set.

McElhone has a degree of poise and presence as Alex, playing her as a more vulnerable, damaged character than Close did, but if anything her metamorphosis from being a woman rightfully pissed off at Dan’s abandonment to a stabby pixie dream girl is even harder to swallow as a result. Bazeley, meanwhile, just about convinces as a man in too deep; he gets across the character’s spinelessness, but lacks Douglas’ charisma. Occasionally he gets to deliver a few lines of soliloquy/voice-over but these feel as if they’ve been designed to paper over the set changes rather than to offer any psychological insight.

The set changes quite a lot by the way. Sometimes a few moving electric blue panels are used to convey a sense of the city, other sets are more detailed and realist (and fiddly to assemble). There’s also a very large cast for what could well have been played as a two hander, like they’re justifying the high cost of tickets by populating the stage. People are forever strolling purposefully from one side of the set to the other or standing in little whispery huddles that are meant to convey that we are in a “hot new bar” or a busy Manhattan law office.

Nunn seems to give up completely on making the piece theatrically viable towards the end; when Alex makes off with Dan’s daughter and a frantic Beth crashes her car in pursuit, it all happens off-stage, complete with comedy car crash sound effect. The final confrontation between Alex and Dan, in which he’s so incensed he comes close to killing her, plays out as one lumbering clunky fight scene, utterly lacking in momentum. And when the police come for Dan in the concluding moments one of them brings the bloody knife with him in a handy backpack, for the benefit of those who may have dozed off.

In the ending that was originally filmed, Close’s Alex slits her own throat, falling out of frame just as the blood starts to flow, with a few strains of Madame Butterfly playing in the background. Here Nunn has her bathed in red light, wearing a flowing kimono, plunging the knife into her belly, with Callas in full belt. All told, his production has the effect of ridding a thriller of the majority of its thrills (even the bunny boiling is fumbled), stripping the character of Beth of what little agency she ever had and making Lyne’s film feel like an exercise in taste and restraint.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Major Tom, BAC

Though hers is ostensibly a solo show, Victoria Melody is never alone on stage. She shares the space with her beloved basset hound, the Major Tom of the title, a magnificent beast; a creature of melancholic dignity – which he maintains even when being reluctantly made to parade around the stage. Rumpled and stumpy, his snout is framed by a pair of silken conker-coloured ears; he regards a proffered dog treat as if it had disappointed him in some profound way before curling up on his cushion and falling asleep, a state in which he spends most of the show.

The presence of her canine companion adds an extra element of liveness to the piece – every mildly inquisitive lift of his head, every tentative stretch and lumber into a more comfortable corner of the stage, is met with coos and giggles from the audience. This is never disruptive though; his presence is a pleasure, it adds to the show’s charm and warmth, and proves rather fitting in a piece which is, after all, about the culture of display.

Melody is interested in tribes, their codes, rules and rituals. She immerses herself in worlds, allows her life and her work to intersect and overlap in interesting ways. In the case of Major Tom, it’s the world of championship dog show handling she’s exploring while at the same time charting her active involvement in the beauty pageant circuit. She spent a year as Mrs Brighton, attending functions, cutting ribbons, teetering in vertiginous heels across rain-swept car parks, jiving in a tiara at Brighton Pride, before going on to compete for the title of Mrs England. Major Tom meanwhile proves such a hit on the amateur dog show circuit that Melody decides to enter him for Crufts.

The two strands of the show feed on one another. Melody juxtaposes her own physical transformation into beauty queen material – hair extensions, spray tan, endless sessions in the gym to shift the weight she had purposefully piled on over the ‘best Christmas ever’ – with her attempts to break into professional dog show handling with Major Tom. Both are subject to a ridiculous amount of physical scrutiny, prodded and poked, assessed and found wanting. He is deemed to have too big a rib cage, while a plastic surgeon tells Melody her mouth is upside down.

Melody intersperses accounts of her experiences with video footage – including a hilarious montage in which both herself and Major Tom are subject to an intense and somewhat extreme grooming regime. At times there seems to be a dash of Louis Theroux to her approach, though she gets far more deeply immersed and enmeshed in the worlds she’s exploring than he does, rather than remaining a wry outsider. This makes the show more personal, but also in some ways less bladed. The people she meets along the way – the beauticians, her fellow contestants, the various “Brians” of the basset hound world – remain sketches, briefly glimpsed, rather than emerging as characters in their own right. The piece focuses more on the codes and processes, the subtle hierarchies, rather than the people who participate and their motivations for doing so. It’s much less exploitative and uncomfortable as a result but also creates a degree of distance. We’re viewing these universes through her eyes, through her lens.

While I found myself wanting more analysis, I recognise that’s not what Melody was out to do here. She engages with these worlds on their own terms and presents us with their quirks and absurdities as she encounters them, without passing judgement, without drawing conclusions, leaving it all out there for the audience to digest. And as an exercise in light-shining, in briefly granting us a glimpses into shadowed and closed corners of British life, the show is never less than engaging. Melody is an affable, generous performer, funny and honest – and of course she has Major Tom as her stage-mate and sidekick, whose very presence – even while dozing, which he does for roughly 83% of the evening – is brightening.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Coriolanus, Donmar Warehouse

Coriolanus is a man of the battlefield. War is a language he speaks with fluency. It is the way he has been raised. But what makes him such a potent force in a time of conflict, a fire-eyed, driven machine of a man, doesn’t translate to the political arena. And this proves his undoing.

Making his return to the Donmar stage, Tom Hiddleston revels in the knottiness and complexity of the character. He last performed here as Cassio in Michael Grandage’s Othello, in which he more than held his own alongside the magnetic, magnificent Chiwetel Ejiofor and in many ways eclipsed Ewan McGregor’s Iago. Now – following his Asgardian interlude – he confirms what a capable and engaging stage actor he can be; his performance is one of clarity but it’s also layered: he is proud, courageous, arrogant and vain all at the same time. It’s a very physical performance, he struts and grapples, simmers and winces, and yet he always keeps something back; he won’t give of himself to the people, won’t use his scars as trophies. He bristles at the position into which he has been pushed and fumes at the people in front of whom he must display himself and lay himself bare.

Josie Rourke’s production is an intensely corporeal one, all skin and sweat and blood. It contains some striking imagery: at one point Hiddleston stands before us green-garlanded with blood rivering his face like a red masque of death; later, as the adrenaline of battle dissipates, he flinches and grits his teeth as he bathes the blood of others from his ravaged body. The choreography of the early fight scenes is slick and physical – Coriolanus and his enemy hurl each other about the stage, dashing each other to the floor – but it’s almost too slick, and there are times when you find yourself marvelling at the technical effort involved, at the clank of cutlass on cutlass, at the force with which the punches appear to land, rather than feeling any sense of the rawness and mess of warfare. (Though, at least, when they finally cast their weapons aside and grapple on the floor you do get a glimpse of this).

The cast wear a mixture of leather breastplates and tight black jeans, with neckerchiefs tied at their throats and clothing which is intentionally asymmetric. They wouldn’t look entirely out of place hanging out with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton in the subways of 1980s New York. Later the banished Coriolanus wears a cowl so precise in its raggedness that you can almost see the kiddie scissor marks. And, yes, there’s more than a dash of Loki the trickster in these later scenes, as he twists and infiltrates, smiling his enigmatic smile.

The supporting performances are also very strong. Coriolanus’ formidable mother Voluminia is the kind of woman who swells with pride at the thought of her son being wounded on the battlefield and Deborah Findlay gives a fittingly impassioned performance though she doesn’t have the ice-eyed majesty of Vanessa Redgrave, who played the role in the 2011 film (but, then, who does?). Mark Gatiss is soft-spoken and delicately paternal as Coriolanus’ advisor Menenius and the scene of his rejection is one of the play’s most moving, while Borgen’s Birgitte Hjort Sørensen does what she can with a role that says so much with silence, as the cast-aside wife.

The back wall of the stage is strewn with graffiti (of the actual, spray-painted kind) to which more is added digitally, the slogan “grain at our own price” multiplying and spreading as the soundtrack thumps and pounds. This feels like a misstep, a half-hearted way of insisting on the play’s ‘now-ness’ while also undermining it, and, much like the choice of costumes, making it feel oddly dated. The sense of hunger and want which underscores the text and its exploration of power and the reasons people lead don’t really need to be underlined quite so heavily.

In the end these things don’t really get in the way of what is an engaging production. Hiddleston is a compelling central figure and the visuals are very often memorable, but there’s a gloss and polish to it all, a sense of engineering which subtly undercuts its potency.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Blueabeard, Soho Theatre

We do love a monster. It's a recurrent cultural trope - Lecter, Dexter, Dracula - men who can rip you to pieces, who can make you bleed. Hattie Naylor’s monologue dives deep under the skin of one such man as he seeks out submissive women for sexually violent encounters. If the women ask too much of him, if they dare to dig into his past, the encounters are fatally terminated.

Lee Lyford’s production is a pitch black trip into the bloodiest of chambers. Paul Mundell’s performance as this killer of women, this wolf in sharp clothing, is a thing of precision, every word weighted, every vowel relished, every smile controlled and loaded. Though superficially charismatic, there are times when even his eyes seem to blacken with hate. In the middle of this Lyford lets him cut loose and suddenly this measured man is dancing like a wild thing, fists pumping, arms twirling, breath heaving from him in ragged bursts.

Hayley Grindle’s design accentuates the sense of unease, with six slender strip lights glinting like neon ribs and a seventh suspended from chains up above. A leather armchair sits in the centre of the stage like a throne and beneath Mundell’s words there’s a constant ominous under-pulse, enhancing the sense of claustrophobia. The piece loses its footing a little as it nears its resolution and there’s a sense that, in some ways, it feeds the machine it sets out to critique, but for all this it’s still a gripping and incredibly intense experience.

Reviewed for The Stage

Fatherland, Battersea Arts Centre

A circle is chalked on the floor, a space for spell-casting and spirit conjuring. Then the drums begin to thunder, louder, louder, and the woman in the grey suit starts to dance, a series of ritualised movements, toe and heel, arms aloft, the dance of her fathers.

Nic Green’s new show is an exploration of absence, the spaces between people. Can a relationship exist with someone who is not there? Who has never been there? Inspired by Green’s own experiences of meeting her Scottish father for the first and only time as a sixteen year old, Fatherland is about the space we create for ourselves in the world and the way we define ourselves in relation to others, even if they have never really been present in our lives.

We are played into the room by bagpipes and sit arrayed on all four sides of the space. Green begins by assembling a choir of ‘fathers’ from the men in the audience and engages them in a poetic pre-scripted exchange, a refracted conversation with a man she met only once and who she struggles to recall in any real detail, what he looked like, which pub they went to; he’s the ghost in the room, the ghost within her. Her approach is delicate, the man, and the land from which he came, are like invisible tethers tying her to something which is hard to pin down; there’s a drifting quality to the show in the beginning. At times it’s almost too cobwebby, the lilting language cloudlike and lacking in solidity. That’s perhaps the point, the absence of anchor, the sensation of floating free, but from the audience’s perspective there’s not a lot to grab onto; we drift too, but not always with her.

And then the drums kick in. A wild, tribal heart-thump; a primal, pounding sound. Green starts to dance, shedding clothes as she does so. First her jacket, than her shirt, than her trousers, until she’s bare except for her Louise Brooks bob and her tartan-tailed knickers, blue as woad. She dances with her head high, cheeks colouring with the effort and a single streak of sweat licking down her back like a second spine. Her dance combines the quality of a battle cry with the abandonment of dancing around in your bedroom when you know no one is watching, breasts bobbing, flesh quivering with each rhythmic stamp. I look around the room and people are beaming.

Then, as she slows, as the drums still, the whisky bottles emerge. Single malt. Islay. A peaty smell fills the air as we fill our glasses, passing the bottle from hand to hand, row to row. A toast is raised. A couple of people clink their glasses. Then another two, then another, and suddenly the room is filled with the music of the charged glass, as we, smoke- throated, are invited to connect with each other and with her, to share this moment.

Even when the piece is elusive and remote, as it sometimes is in the beginning, there’s a warmth to it, a sense of invitation. This is something Green excels at, having created Trilogy, a three stranded piece exploring contemporary feminism that centred on a celebration of the female form, a gloriously naked dance sequence in which Green, her fellow performers and a whole host of volunteers bared all and invited women in the audience to do the same. While the piece as whole was messy in places and somewhat front-loaded (so to speak), there was something inescapably joyous about that dance: all that jumping, stamping, shaking. The beauty of bodies in motion.

And I was up there with them, one of a hundred or so, naked on the Barbican stage, roaring and leaping, arms in the air, skin bright under the lights. It seems trite to say it, but it was freeing, putting yourself out there like that, letting yourself go; the sense of unity between the participants was strong and Green made sure that the experience was a positive one for all involved, easing us into it, making sure everyone felt comfortable. For someone who finds the idea of public speaking anxiety inducing it was as unexposed as I’ve ever felt in front of an audience and it genuinely made me examine my relationship with my body.

This piece has a similar strength, though this time Green stands alone – dances alone. It’s a more personal, inward piece, but in its roar, in its thunder, it draws its audience together.

Reviewed for Exeunt

London Stories, Battersea Arts Centre

A dialogue review of BAC's new 1-on-1-on-1 festival between myself and Catherine Love. We went on different nights and experienced different routes and a different collection of storytellers.

The full piece is over Exeunt.

Edward II, National Theatre

If Dexter has taught us anything it’s that when the heavy duty plastic sheeting starts gets rolled out things are bound to get messy. Yet in Joe Hill-Gibbins production most of the mess comes before this moment, the cacophony replaced by a quiet, desperate tension, the appalling gentleness of Edward’s inevitable demise made all the more powerful by the noise and excess that came earlier.

Hill-Gibbins’ take on Marlowe has a similar chaotic, near operatic energy to his recent version of The Changeling for the Young Vic. But just as that lost some of its focus and intensity when taken from the smaller Maria studio and blown up and out to fill the Main House, this too feels a bit hyper-aware of the size of the space it’s required to fill.

The opening sequence has a kind of familiar gloss, an almost Donmar-ish aesthetic, as John Heffernan’s king sits upright on his throne, his crown gleaming against a cloth of gold. But when the curtain lifts we’re instead presented with a series of stage flats, MDF battlements, stripped-down, fragile, transitory. Lizzie Clachan’s design takes full advantage of the depth and height of the Olivier with Hill-Gibbins again making interesting use of closed doors, spaces into which we can’t quite see, rooms in which conspiracies can be hatched amid silver curls of cigarette smoke.

After the opening coronation scene, the production becomes increasingly stylistically layered, making much use of Brechtian title cards and video, running Headlong into Katie Mitchell territory. It’s an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach, chock-full of references. Live recorded footage is used to convey a sense of up-the-nostril Blair Witch proximity to a world that might otherwise seem remote on the cavernous stage. One memorable sequence, which recalls the meta-theatrical playfulness of Rupert Goold’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, uses the external architecture of the National Theatre itself – its turrets and stairwells, its blocky concrete eminence – as a backdrop for the introduction of Spencer and Baldock. The cry of ‘drums’ becomes a defining one, with a throbbing, pulsing, humming running through things.

Yet at times it feels more like a tick-list of directorial influences rather than a cohesive universe. There are sinister helmeted henchmen – Three Kingdoms by way of Knightmare – and much gleeful anachronism. But this approach pays off in the end: as Edward’s balsa wood kingdom is toppled, the production stills itself too and the final scenes have a chilling and bleak power.

When fully robed in the opening scenes, Heffernan’s Edward combines the studied regal air of Eddie Redmayne’s Richard II with something of Disney’s other lion king; in the beginning he’s bratty and petulant, a foot stamper rather than a thumb-sucker, albeit one with a massive hard-on for Koyle Soller’s Gaveston, a drainpipe-jeaned yank outsider who makes a parkour-style entrance from the stalls, bounding onto the stage, wrapping himself around Edward’s body, locking lips. In an apt yet poignant piece of mirroring, Soller will later be the one to finish Edward when he returns as the assassin Lightbody. Despite the ominous expanse of plastic sheeting, there is no blood, just one lone broken man, the life leaking from him.

Good as both Heffernan and Soller are, they’re matched by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s deeply charismatic Mortimer and by Vanessa Kirby, whose crimson Isabella has the calculating aspect of Cersei Lannister. Near mute in the first half of the play and wearing a wig last seen on Guy of Gisbourne in Maid Marian and her Merry Men, Bettrys Jones’ Prince Edward really comes to life in the last few scenes, to unnerving effect; there’s strong support too from Kirsty Bushell and Penny Layden in some creative examples of cross-gender casting.

The production might well place the visual ahead of the lyrical, it might take a craft knife to some of those ‘mighty lines’ but these plays aren’t going anywhere, they can take it. It does however fall short of the queasy, bloated brilliance of Hill-Gibbins’ The Changeling, but that’s perhaps because it keeps its foot hovering just over the brake, it never quite lets rip, it never quite floors it, even though it threatens to on occasion.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: Stand By for Tape Back-Up

It’s human to seek patterns in apparent chaos, to hear voices in white noise, to sculpt shapes and faces from clouds. Ross Sutherland’s show is concerned with this phenomenon, with synchronicity, the ‘meaningful coincidence.’

In Stand By for Tape Back-Up, Sutherland riffs on found footage from an old video cassette belonging to his grandfather. He uses these clips, culled from the pop cultural backdrop of his 1980s childhood – The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Ghostbusters, The Crystal Maze, Jaws – as the inspiration for a series of poetic pieces. The tape plays out behind him as he performs and his words are guided by the images, circling, syncing, each new loop of the tape generating fresh collisions. Pause. Rewind. Replay.

This is perhaps the most potent of Sutherland’s linguistic exercises to date. Previously he’s played with substitution and translation, machine-made poetics, participatory experiments in heckling, but here the formal inventiveness and iterative experimentation is coupled with something even more emotionally explorative. The effect is hypnotic, simultaneously soothing and rousing, the language ripe and bright. With each groundhog twist through the same set of images, each spin of a skinny-limbed Will Smith above the head of his Philly playground antagonist, things reset and another layer of interpretation is added.

The video footage seems to infect the verse: Sutherland is not just describing what’s happening on screen, it’s more subtle and symbiotic than that. He’s dancing with it, driven by it. It reminded me of the ghosting process in the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, a production in which the actors weren’t just engaged in restaging and recreating Richard Burton’s famous Broadway production but were somehow inhabited by the spectral monochrome world which played out on the screens behind them, an act of channelling, a dash of the uncanny. I was also put in mind of Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s epic Life and Times, or at least the first two episodes, in which the minutiae of one woman’s life, all the little tics and rhythms of conversational speech, complete with pauses, ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ were rendered poetic through repetition. There’s something similarly alchemical going on here.

Nostalgia can be a grubby currency, cheaply traded (especially on the Fringe), but shared cultural memory has an undeniable emotional charge which Sutherland taps into, exploring his relationship with his grandfather, both as a child and as an adult, evoking a sense of inheritance and human continuation through a collage of the shows he once watched as a boy.

The clip of The Crystal Maze shows a woman repeatedly failing to understand the rules of the game despite her teammates’ urgent shouted instructions; she comes close to solving it, but bails in the final seconds. No matter how many times you repeat it, whatever spin you put on it, that crucial button remains unpressed, the elusive crystal unclaimed. The Jaws sequence is perhaps not quite as strong as the others, but it serves a purpose in terms of textural variety and the Natwest ad coda is a beautiful fist-pump of a finale.

This a wonderfully layered piece, touching, funny and linguistically thrilling; a show which works on a whole host of levels, a show threaded with modern madeleines and great, green ghosts in the machine.

Pause. Rewind. Replay.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: On The Beach

John Osborne’s On the Beach provides its audience with a chance to draw breath amid the noise of the Fringe. It’s a quiet, contemplative piece, an act of taking stock. Over the course of the show Osborne describes in detail a walk he once took along Weymouth beach on a rare sunny English afternoon, a minor act of escape.

He gives us potted portraits of the people he encounters – the man reading an Irvine Welsh novel in his deck chair, the family playing a game of cricket together, and the elderly couple who remember the beach before it was clotted with stag and hen parties, for whom it provides a respite from a world that’s galloped on ahead of them – imagining their backstories.

The beach at Weymouth is a place Osborne last visited at the age of eleven and memory, both personal and cultural, shape this show. The British seaside is a strange kind of borderland, a place of Greeneland seediness and melancholy as well as ice cream cheer and arcade fire. Osborne captures that contrast through a process of collage. Some of his observations are simple, even a little mundane, but through a process of gentle layering a picture is painted. The show is not specifically about the decline of a place the or the laying of coastal ghosts, it’s not a hymn to what once was, rather a brief, refreshing paddle in what remains. It deals in nostalgia in the lightest of ways with the understanding that looking back won’t heal you, but it is important if you’re to move forwards.

Osborne’s conversational style of delivery is delicate, even hesitant in places; it’s the antithesis of aggressive, his words lapping like waves, his demeanour that of a slightly hung over, rumpled puppy. His story is intercut with music – Belle and Sebastian, Nina Nastasia’s apt ‘Our Day Trip’ – and seaside imagery is projected on the wall behind him: merry-go-rounds and time-bleached photographs, a solitary figure sitting on a bench and staring out at the water. An excursion to Great Yarmouth, care of a friend of his who lives by the sea but hates the feel of sand beneath her feet, feels digressive and underdeveloped in comparison to the rest of the material.

It’s the accumulation of detail that really makes the piece shine. There’s a sadness to it but also a hopefulness, a courage in its quietness. It invites its audience to slow down, remove their shoes and open their eyes, to walk with him for a while, an invitation which feels particularly necessary and welcome amid the clamour of the Edinburgh Fringe.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: Birdhouse

There was a moment in the BBC’s rather one-note Hitchcock biodrama,The Girl, in which a tortoise-like, prosthetic-laden Toby Jones, playing the great director, repeatedly hurled live birds towards Sienna Miller’s immaculate ice-blonde head. Jammy Voo do something similar inBirdhouse, flinging ideas at the audience like winged things which flap and bat and peck at you without settling, without coming into land.

The initial premise presents us with a group of tweedy middle aged women, all dressed in guano-spattered vintage jackets and calf-length skirts, who have taken shelter in the Coronet cinema in the besieged Bodega Bay and are watching the events of Hitchcock’s 1963 film, The Birds, play out from the periphery. In later scenes they also use Du Maurier’s unexplained bird-black cloud as a metaphor for a more general sense of terror, of the unknown, of violence raining from the sky.

Both of these ideas are intriguing: their waltzing with such an iconic film and their tentative exploration of the power of nightmares. But both seem only to have been brushed against in what is more akin to a curious cabaret with musical accompaniment provided by a man in a popcorn booth. The songs are rather beautiful and the lo-fi shadow puppet sequences which pepper the show have real charm – particularly one in which a series of shadowy telegraph poles roll past a car windscreen brilliantly recreating the effect of rear-projection footage in an old movie – but there’s a disconnected, half-formed feel to the piece as a whole.

From an aesthetic point of the view the show is appealing and delightfully inventive. There’s a game show sequence in which two of the women are obliged to answer questions about collective nouns while a third arranges tiny black pegs on a clothes line above a model of the Brenner house. Sometimes the effect of the show is unsettling – when eggs emerge from their mouths or a crow jams its glinting beak into a woman’s eye – sometimes it’s just odd. There’s also quite a bit of bird puppetry, both of the shadow and feathered variety, some spectacular birds’ nest hair-dos and a fair bit of general Lecoqing about.

Structurally the piece feels like a thematically connected series of sketches with an ornithological obsession. Much of what these are funny and playful; the piece’s riffing on the language of 1960s cinema is witty and the songs are superbly executed, but it remains an opaque and distant thing, and the idea of transposing Hitchcockian dread to a contemporary world, the social spread of anxiety and paranoia, is only ever teasingly examined.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: Each of Us

Ben Moor’s latest solo show is a delicate, glinting thing. It takes its audience on a quest for treasure and finds it in words, in the imagination, in each other, in a hot dark room in Edinburgh.

The play is ribboned with wit and word play, with linguistic zig-zaggery, images that lodge themselves firmly and deeply in the memory. Moor excels at taking familiar things and twisting them, spinning them a degree or two away from the expected. The universe he describes is recognisable and yet not. Concepts are inverted, upended, stood on their heads. There’s a streak of absurdist humour at play too in this story of relationships and connection and the hope we keep locked in boxes, a dash of Lewis Carroll. It’s hard to condense what is so text-heavy without merely repeating favourite lines or ideas or images. Part of the pleasure is in letting the story wrap its arms around you, like a hug. A big wordy hug.

The plot meanders through a series of chance encounters had by a narrator – a corporate thwart by profession, a generator of institutional incompetence – who has recently gone through a break up from his wife, Radium. It’s a mirror world Moor’s created here, but not in a satirical sense, instead it’s almost science-fictiony in its skewed view of things, a world in which the lonely reunite with people with whom they didn’t go to school and where children play with dystopian Lego. And yet it’s also very much the world we’ve made, a world where true communication can get lost amid the noise and we sometimes need to pause and remember what matters, what’s precious to us.

There’s nothing inherently theatrical about any of this. It’s just Moor talking, though his stage presence, if that’s the right term, is part of the appeal, measured, gentle, eccentric, slightly vulnerable. He pads around the studio space barefoot, a little hesitant at times. And yet he holds your attention throughout, transports you into his universe.

Some of his jokes are blunter than others (though this is very much comparative) and he’s not afraid of a pun when the moment calls for one (not a bad thing by any means). I would have appreciated more in the way of narrative momentum, but that’s a question of taste more than anything else. The piece as a whole speaks of the need for human connection, to be known, to be seen, to be held. “We are all transmitters and receivers of stories”, he says at one point and if you love language and the places it can take you, then you’ll listen to the story he has to tell.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: I Wish I was Lonely

At the 2003 Edinburgh Book Festival Douglas Coupland, on tour to promote Hey Nostradamus!, asked his audience to help him recreate an installation piece he’d created in response to the shootings at Columbine. Coupland had been fascinated by something one of the first police officers on the scene had said to the press. The sound that met him in that empty cafeteria, he’d explained, was not one of eerie silence but a growing tide of noise as one by one the students’ mobile phone began to ring, to sing, from within their abandoned bags and backpacks. He likened the sound to a flock of tropical birds. In a tent in Charlotte Square Gardens, Coupland asked people to exchange numbers and ring the person sitting next to them, and gradually the tent began to chirp and trill, the sound building, slowly at first but rising in volume: an insistent, unanswered chorus.

In times of disaster we reach for our phones, seeking contact, reassurance, to be cradled by someone else’s voice. Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe, co-creators of The Oh Fuck Moment, are interested in this impulse, in the way our relationship with these devices has reframed our ideas of intimacy and absence. Is it possible to be truly alone with a phone in our pocket? Are our relationships with the people we’re close to changing by the fact we never have to wait to share something with them, a joke, an idle observation, a piece of news that might upend their life forever?

We are encouraged on entry to leave our phones on, to remain connected, reachable. Walker and Thorpe actively welcome this potential for external intrusion and are cool with the poetry of their show being punctured by brief blasts of Beyonce and the blips and ribbets of incoming text alerts. If someone’s phone rings, they’re instructed to answer. “Sorry, I’m in a show.” “Yes. In a show. Right now.”

The audience are dispersed around the room on chairs, our phones in our hands and someone else’s number penciled on a piece of card. We are told to leave each other voice mails. As we key in the numbers and the first few phones begin to chirp I find myself picturing a field of invisible lasers, a kind of cat’s cradle of green beams connecting us all. I know how that’s not how it works but the image is appealing and, as phone after phone start to ring, I find myself visualising the lines that join us all together. One girl mistimes her call, answers instead, and ends up speaking to twin voices, the one in the room and the one in her ear. The lag between the two seems to unsettle her. “Hello?” she repeats anxiously, suspiciously. “Hello?”

Together we turn text messages into found poetry and experience the strange, transient intimacy of having a stranger’s words arrive in our inbox. Later Thorpe asks us to place our phones in a chalk circle in the middle of the room, a simple act which underlines what talismanic objects these thin, glinting things are to most people, digital tefillin, memory boxes. There they sit sun-spotted on the floorboards as he stalks among them like a crotchety giant. A couple of people get visibly twitchy, suffering from separation anxiety.

Walker’s more ambivalent relationship to her phone, her tendency to let texts go unanswered, her reluctance to respond instantly and immediately, is one I recognise. I often forget to switch mine on and rarely do I answer it unless I am somewhere indoors, somewhere quiet, somewhere safe. I do not relish the constant connection, the updates and alerts. I do not want to be locatable, traceable. I like to be able to shut the world up for a while, to be solitary, to focus on one thing without interruption, to hide in plain sight.

My scuffed seven-year-old Nokia looked so sad and small among the buckshot circle of sleek devices. As we create a wave of words, an undulating conga line of verse that rings the room, I start to wonder about interaction and this web from which I have chosen to exclude myself. Will this minor act of disconnection have increasing social consequences? Am I painting myself out of the world? Is the physic space gained worth the trade off, to be shut out, cut off from this process of continual engagement? On balance I still think it is, but, interestingly, with less certainty than I once did.

At one point Thorpe eyes one particular phone and snaps, stomps, shattering it underfoot. People gasp and whimper, than let out a collective sigh of relief when they realise it’s not their precious thing that has been Hulk-smashed into plastic debris. They’re safe.

And it’s a prop of course, a plant.

Except…on this occasion it’s not: something goes awry and it transpires that the battered, trampled phone actually does belong to a member of the audience, who is oddly accepting of this act of vandalism. This injection of accidental reality gives the performance an extra frisson. How would you react if your phone was suddenly erased, your connection suddenly severed? (Thorpe, to his credit, deals with his own oh-fuck moment swiftly and hugely apologetically, dashing off to secure a replacement immediately afterwards).

It’s easy thing to say, that a piece of theatre is thought provoking, but in this case I do sit in the sunny Drill Hall café afterwards and think about the piece and my response to it, studying my black box, thinking about the things it holds and wondering if I’d be brave enough to silence it for good.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: Knee Deep

There’s a wild free-running energy to Knee Deep. The four performers hurl themselves at one another, rubber-banding off one another’s bodies, teetering on the edge of stage. They stand on each other’s shoulders, climbing each other like vines, before dangling from the ceiling like human chandeliers.

This is the circus of exertion, the emphasis placed on the body and the limits to which it can be pushed. Performed by Australian circus troupe Casus within the crimson cocoon of the Spiegeltent, the audience are close enough to see them sweat, to watch their muscles pulse with the effort. It’s not that it’s not polished, because it is, but we’re also made aware of the element of risk involved.

The company are clearly interested in fragility. This is established in the opening sequence in which Emma Serjeant, the company’s only female member, places a couple of boxes of eggs on the stage. She then places her weight first on to one box than the other, standing on the eggs. They don’t crack; they don’t shatter – they bear her, hold her. It’s a striking image, performed with grace and delicacy.

The show takes the form of a series of wordless vignettes, some solo, some in which all four share the stage. There is much leaping, balancing and tumbling followed by silk and rope-work. They tread on one another’s shoulders, backs, even heads, and spin and throw each other around the place as if they were dolls; they turn their bodies into totems, sculptures, bearing each other’s weight. They hang off each other in various rather alarming ways, performing the kind of lifts and balances that make the audience wince and gasp and laugh all at the same time. Many of the routines resemble a kind of human parkour with the performers limbs standing in for the bollards and railings and other urban obstacles. Spectacular as much of this is though, the small touches – the brief smiles that pass between performers, the nods of reassurance – are just as central to the
feel of the piece.

Half way through the performance they strip down to their briefs and the show becomes a celebration of skin. Both Serjeant and Nantano Fa'anana have elaborate tattoos and these become part of the aesthetic of the piece, the ink like armour, their strength only emphasised. Fa'anana slaps at his bare chest and legs, slowly at first but quicker, quicker, a rhythm building, his body his instrument.

Later the eggs make a return, miraculously remaining intact, uncracked; there’s a sequence with wine bottles which is also elegantly, playfully executed, the eggs and bottles making us all too aware of how breakable people can be. They don’t overplay it, but it’s still a potent image.

While it’s true that a couple of the sequences feel superfluous – there’s some classic blockhead business with a hammer and a nail, some tepid hula-hooping – this is an exhilarating hour of contemporary circus that also makes you think a little differently about the body and its capabilities, both theirs and your own.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: The Events

Are there limits to human compassion? Are some acts so awful that they can never be fully understood, never mind, forgiven? These questions sit at the heart of David Greig’s new play for ATC and the Traverse.

The piece, which grew out of conversations which took place after Anders Breivik’s island massacre in Norway in 2011, was created in close collaboration with director Ramin Gray.

Claire – the only named character – is a vicar who has survived a mass shooting incident which has left many people in her community choir dead, only narrowly escaping being shot herself.  Claire is consumed by the need to know how such a thing could happen; she’s desperate to figure out why someone would commit such an act, why someone would take up a gun and kill and kill and kill again. This need to find an answer, to turn the events of that day into something she can process and rationalise, consumes her. Her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, she’s not sleeping, and she’s taken to imposing unwelcome spiritual healing rituals on the surviving choir members.

The perpetrator, she discovers, had a fairly troubled childhood, but it wasn’t any more troubled than many people’s – is there a line, a level of damage, which would make his violence more understandable? Would it have made a difference of he were insane? If his rampage was the result of aberrant brain chemistry? Or are there some things which are beyond comprehension, monstrous, evil? Rudi Dharmalingum plays the unnamed perpetrator – as well as several other characters, including Claire’s councillor and her girlfriend – as a flat voiced, detached figure, neither a rage machine nor a frothing monster, but a man who barely seems to understand his own motivations. He talks about tribalism, Vikings, the need to protect his kind, the failure of multiculturalism, but he’s no zealot. At one point he goes on a berserker vision quest and ends up retching like a cat with a hair ball – Grieg doesn’t shy away from humour, in blurring the line between the appalling and the absurd.

The most striking aspect of the production – which plays out on a stage near-naked except for a few benches at the back, a tea urn on a table, a piano and a pile of blue plastic stacking chairs – is the presence of a local choir. In every city to which the production will tour, a different choir will participate. Their voices join together with Claire’s, forming a chorus, but their non-actor status – they read their lines from folders – means that they are somehow both physically present and absent at the same time. It’s an effective device, a potent reminder of those that have been silenced – who are no longer there with Claire – and of those that continue to sing, to live.

What’s most interesting about the production is the way that, with its fragmentary structure and slightly detached quality enhanced by the presence of the choir, it manages to explore a situation which is incredibly horrific and upsetting without being overtly horrific and upsetting itself, maintaining a sense of space around the subject which allows its audience to think, to breathe, without putting them through an emotional wringer. Greig and Gray could rip you apart if they chose to, of that I’m fairly sure, but they pull back, build in barriers, and it’s a stronger piece for this.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2013: Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an arresting looking woman: tall, slim, long of limb, with a kiss curl of dark hair – and a filthy mouth. From those pretty lips spills a stained tale of anal sex, menstrual threesomes, pornography of every stripe and shade and lashings of masturbation. Some of what she says draws gasps – the kind of gasps that begin as half-laughs. There’s still, it seems, a little electric tickle when a good-looking woman with a crystalline voice talks dirty – and Fleabag, which Waller-Bridge also wrote, revels in this, probing and stroking the line between empowerment and degradation.

She plays a confident, aggressively sexual young woman who takes pleasure in the power she has over men. The worst thing she can imagine is someone not finding her attractive. But her strutting fuck-me-or-fuck-off attitude is tempered by an absence, a need, a ghosting behind the eyes.

The solo show initially takes the shape of a job interview with Waller-Bridge perched on a stool under the cruel corrugated ceiling of the Underbelly, responding to a man’s disembodied recorded voice. It then segues into a confessional, with her addressing the audience directly. At first the character is played for laughs. She’s good at pushing buttons with her well lubricated fingers, taking delight in our disquiet at her more outrageous tales (“does this mean I have a huge arsehole?” she muses after an impromptu backdoor festival fuck), but gradually cracks start to appear as we find out that her boyfriend has left her (she claims not to be too fussed by this, is adamant that he’ll come crawling back), she’s estranged from both her father and sister, her closest friend recently died and the business she runs is failing.

All this rampant wanking and sexual questing begins to feel like desperation, hole-filling of a more psychological kind. There’s a beautiful extended sequence in which she mimes undressing and taking photos with her phone of her breasts and vagina in a disabled toilet, click-clicking away with her finger, while her head is tilted to one side, her gaze vacant, the antithesis of eroticism.

Waller-Bridge’s performance is riveting: candid, split open, fruit-fleshed. She expertly manages the release of information, the timing, the tonal shifts and slips. But I do wonder whether, from a dramatic perspective, the trajectory of the piece was a bit too obvious – whether it would have been more exciting and interesting to do away with the damage and make the character even harder and more unrepentant, to really push things. As it is, there were times where the piece made me wince, made me uncomfortable – and then made me consider exactly why it made me feel uncomfortable (would me response have been the same if a man was saying the same things, telling the same stories? I doubt it, though I’m not sure).

Fleabag is a confrontational piece of comic writing, a funny, nasty, sharp-edged account of sexual self-sabotage and debasement that leaves its sticky fingerprints all over your skin.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, Temple Studios

I really like the group review as a format, especially for something as huge in scale as the new show by Punchdrunk.

Stewart Pringle, Lauren Mooney, William Drew and I discussed our varying experiences of the new show, the idea of active spectatorship and the piece's relationship to the world of video games.

The full conversation is on Exeunt.