REVIEW: Sinbad the Sailor at Theatre Royal Stratford East

The Theatre Royal Stratford East owes a big part of its history to panto, especially from the Fifties, when a production of Alice in Wonderland contributed to resuming the regular activities of the financially troubled venue. For the 2016 season, what’s tagged as ‘the people’s theatre’ proposes two alternative titles, with Sinbad the Sailor opening just one day after Rapunzel.

Under Paul Sirett’s pen, the Middle Eastern tale of a fearless sailor defying the seven seas becomes the misadventure of a clumsy boy, bravely supported by his sister Sinbadda (Gabby Wong) and the loyal ape Funky Monky (Gemma Salter). Contending the hand of the Princess (Marianna Neofitou) with the ruthless Prince Naw-Ze Uzz (Michael Bertenshaw), Sinbad (Julian Capolei) is challenged by the Sultan her father (Ben Goffe) to retrieve a golden casket from a desert island. Sinbad embarks on the adventure with the company of Sinbadda, Monky, the Nurse (Johnny Amobi in drag) and the disguised Princess herself. Despite the interference of some pesky pirates, the happy ending is guaranteed, as well as the redemption of the villain and ‘Oh yes, it is’ shouted aplenty.

REVIEW: Mother Goose at Wilton’s Music Hall

Tucked in the western corner of Tower Hamlets, Wilton’s is one of London’s few remaining music halls that were built during the mid-19th Century's boom and survived to decline until this day. The battered but nonetheless gorgeous decor suggests a rocky past, where Wilton’s served as a soup kitchen and as a rug storage, before being enlisted for demolition in the 1960s. Thankfully, it was saved by a public campaign and its doors finally reopened to the public in 1997.

Following last year’s glorious pantomime debut with Dick Whittington & His Cat, the producing venue proposes for 2016 an original version of the classic Mother Goose, written by comedy genius and President of the British Music Hall Society Roy Hudd. Also present on stage in the role of Mother Goose, Hudd delivers a charismatic performance, loaded with eggsilarating puns – allow me this – and references to politics and society. His vivid gaze and kindly touch are more credible as a maternal figure than vanity-driven hag but, under his effortless guidance, the show sails smoothly towards its happy ending.

REVIEW: Her Aching Heart at The Hope Theatre

Celebrating with a magnificent revival the 25th anniversary of Bryony Lavery's Her Aching Heart, The Hope Theatre and producer Andrea Leoncini found the cutest way to welcome their audience. After arriving at the box office, I was offered my ticket attached to a programme by a pin with a heart-shaped head. This little surprise made up for having to wait for the opening of the auditorium in the busy Hope and Anchor pub on the ground floor, which can be quite noisy but is also the best place to grab a quick drink during the interval.

Her Aching Heart is the cheesy account of a fortuitous encounter between two women, which are immediately stricken by an uncontrolled crush for each other. Nor the apparent mutual hatred, nor the social inequality, not even the geographical distance can part what love has joined, as demonstrated by a range of episodes presented in this tongue-and-cheek extravaganza. The peasant and the noble lady’s adventures are told in parallel with that of two other women, who discover a fancy for each other whilst reading the same book.

REVIEW: Testosterone at New Diorama Theatre

Written and performed by Kit Redstone, Testosterone is the hilarious yet thought-provoking autobiographical account of an ordinary man – as we see him on stage – in the process of defining his own masculinity. 

It has been two years since Kit had his first injection of testosterone and he takes it to the stage to talk with the public about the externally unnoticeable divergence between looking like a man and behaving like one. 'What determines our perception of an individual?' – he asks – 'Their looks or their personality? Aren't they supposed to coincide?'. Not necessarily, as we are bound to learn.

With a series of flashbacks and pop-up gags – courtesy of Daniel Jacob and comedy duo Rhum and Clay (Julian Spooner and Matthew Wells) – Kit shares a few anecdotes that represent the milestones along the road of his gender reassignment.

REVIEW: Curl Up and Die at The Questors Theatre

The Questors Theatre, in Ealing Broadway, has been by far my most exciting theatrical discovery of 2016. Opened in 1929, this is one of the largest amateur theatres in Europe and has around 1500 members. The building contains a 350-seat playhouse, a studio, various rehearsing rooms and a vintage tearoom which I shall definitely visit again.

Curl Up and Die is hosted in the spacious 90-seats studio. When we enter, the open set reproduces a 50's hair parlour in the finest detail, with its pastel-pink wallpaper and the rows of funny-shaped bottles aligned on many shelves. A 'fermé' sign hung on the door suggests a wacky attempt at sophistication but everything around looks shabby and outdated.

REVIEW: Fool for Love at Found 111

In the last decade, the presentation of exhibitions and performances in dismissed venues has seen its status changing from pioneering to mainstream. Long gone are the times when companies like Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk were considered ground-breaking for introducing the rescue of abandoned buildings as a significant part of their mission. 2015 was the year that saw London Fashion Week move from the spacious courtyard of Somerset House to the low ceilings of Brewer Street Car Park and the derelict 180 Strand become a sanctuary for designers and arts exhibitors alike. Therefore, it didn’t come as a complete surprise when Soho Theatre announced the launch of a pop-up space in the heart of the West End, at the top of the building that originally housed the Central St Martins School of Art.

REVIEW: Disappearing Acts at The Place

Brainchild of the ground-breaking company Flexer & Sandiland – led by award-winning choreographer Yael Flexer and digital artist Nic Sandiland – Disappearing Acts is not only a contemporary dance performance but a multi-sensorial installation where the public is an integral part of its configuration. Its main purpose is to explore the concepts of ‘visibility and ‘disappearance’ through an elaborate and fast-paced physicality, spoken word, silly magician numbers and continuous variations on the texture of the performing space, thanks to the use of haze and some eerie sound and lighting effects.

When the doors of The Place auditorium open, we are invited to walk in semi-darkness towards centre stage, where four dozen swivelling stools have been disposed in a large circle. A row of traffic warning lights lays in its middle and produces a haunting noise when it’s activated.

REVIEW: Airswimming at The Vaults

There is something special about Airswimming which is quite hard to describe. The running time of 110 minutes without interval is ambitious. The lighting is dim and suggests the shift of characters with a discreet variation of cold and warm shades. The set never changes. Two of the side walls are covered by a powder blue curtain and against the other two are aligned the audience seats. In the middle of the room is a white bathtub, two green chairs and three metal buckets. Very little actually happens on stage, the acting isn’t physically challenging and the two women spend most of the time sat or standing still. Nonetheless, I couldn’t take my eyes off them and the end of the performance arrived sooner than I thought.

REVIEW: No's Knife at the Old Vic

Samuel Beckett’s single-voice Texts for Nothing had never been intended for the stage and, for this reason, lack the usual rigorous author’s stage direction. Nonetheless, theatrical wonder Lisa Dwan embarked on the challenging task of co-directing and performing its adaptation No’s Knife, presented at the Old Vic for its world premiere.

Despite the power with which Beckett’s words take shape through the voice and silences of the actress, I’ve found the speech quite hard to follow, with its meaning hidden behind broken sentences and many rhetoric questions. In the writer’s style, this reflects the attempt to come to terms with the horrors of the second world war and his dramatic direct involvement with the French Resistance.

REVIEW: Bit of Sunshine at Theatre 503

Written and directed by Nicole Zweiback, Bit of Sunshine is a one-woman play about youth at risk and eating disorders. Kira is a teenager whose parents died suddenly when she was only eight years old and the difficulty to cope with this loss is channelled immediately into bulimia.

The play starts in darkness and when the lights go up Kira is there, staring at the audience. Then, for a moment, it’s dark again and next Kira is on a different spot. The idea is good and could suggest the ubiquity of the disease but the effect is spoiled by the use of neon tubes that don’t switch on and off fast enough.

There is a stack of chairs in the corner and a window on the back wall, which will prove to have symbolic role within the play. It nods to the ‘bit of sunshine’ Kira can get into her room at the clinic but also to the loss of her friend Polly.

REVIEW: Paradise of the Assassins at Tara Theatre

The Arabic word ‘assassin’ refers to the Nizari Ismailis, an Islamic sect which engaged, between the 11^th and 13^th century, in psychological warfare and assassination of key enemies. Its politics are the core of the novel Paradise of the Assassins, written in 1899 by the Indian Abdul Halim Sharar and recently adapted into a play by writer and director Anthony Clark. Its premiere at the Tara Theatre marks the inauguration of the new 100-seat auditorium, located within an arts space that, since the 1970s, is committed to fostering the contamination between different cultures through new writing and revisited classics.

REVIEW: Macbeth at Redbridge Drama Centre

Marking the 400^th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, 2016 is the year that saw almost every theatre company giving a go at the Bard’s repertoire, with multifaceted and often unexpected outcomes. Following the same line, Buckle Up Theatre has unusually put aside comedy and physical theatre to present a cutting-edge version of Macbeth set during the Cold War, where the king is depicted as a high-ranked member of the secret police. The result is a well-devised and upbeat 100-minute play which, however, resent the burden of the Elizabethan language.  

As a Shakespeare connoisseur, you might enjoy the innovative values within the original script but if you – like me – are unfamiliar with the subtleties of the plot, you might struggle to keep up with its development. Some of the lines remain hopelessly obscure and doesn’t help the fact that an exiguous cast of five is called to cover several roles, sometimes with hardly perceptible costume changes. If you add to this a noisy group of schoolkids at the back of the 130-seat Lovegrove auditorium, then you might have little attention left to appreciate the ground-breaking angle of this modern Macbeth.

REVIEW: In Our Hands at The New Diorama Theatre

Founded in 2009 by a trio of students at the Rose Bruford College, Smoking Apples is a promising young company that specialises in puppetry and visual theatre, which – while Britain holds its breath in the aftermath of the Brexit vote – finds the perfect timing to re-propose the 2014 production of In Our Hands.  The play – at the New Diorama Theatre for three days as a part of a UK tour –  explores the difficulties that Cornish fishermen had to face after the imposition of EU quotas on fish, which appear quite easy to manipulate by larger corporations.