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'This Is Living' at Trafalgar Studios, 19th May 2016
"This has been a shit week. I died." Life is so unfair. One minute you're a happy-go-lucky young woman in a loving relationship with a young daughter, the next you're a freezing lump of decomposing...
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'We Wait In Joyful Hope' at Theatre503, 20th May 2016
What comes to mind when you think about the Catholic Church? Corrupt old men in golden robes preaching humility? Homophobes falsifying information about birth control? Vicious n’ violent anti abortion...
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'Squirm' at the Bread and Roses, 21st May 2016
It’s a balmy Saturday night in London, the perfect time for barbecues and tossing back cold n' cheap beer. Instead I’m trapped in a bathroom with a suicidal paedophile as he pukes his guts out. This is...
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'Warcraft: The Beginning' (2016) directed by Duncan Jones
I can't believe that the best videogame movie is still Paul W.S. Anderson's 1995 schlock B-flick Mortal Kombat. Undisputed colossi of the medium: Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros, Silent Hill, Resident...
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'Knife Edge' at POND Dalston, 25th May 2016
First off, I want to state for the record that I'd have given this show a good review even if it didn't end with a bountiful Hawaiian dinner. But it did and goddamn it was good. I've always had a soft...
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'Dea' at the Secombe Theatre, 26th May 2016
It's always reassuring when a production feels the need to remind its audience that what they're about to see is fiction. So it is with Edward Bond's incredibly violent and deeply surreal journey...
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'Kenny Morgan' at the Arcola Theatre, 30th May 2016
A pallid body lies in front of a hissing gas fire. It's impossible to know whether it's dead or alive. It's an image equal parts striking and miserable; the famous perfect opening to Terrence...
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'Christie in Love' at the King's Head Theatre, 31st May 2016
Well that makes two plays in the space of a week where a guy fucks a corpse. Even aside from that, my entertainment diet for the last fortnight has consisted of dead wives, paedophilia, a double dose...
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'Off the King's Road' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 3rd June 2016
Oh my god, it's 'the Dude'! Jeff Bridges! Okay, well, he's not actually on stage (he appears via Skype). And okay, the Skype calls are pre-recorded video, but still, Jeff Bridges! This clever bit of...
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'Titanic' at the Charing Cross Theatre, 6th June 2016
Titanic... the musical? It sounds disastrous. What better way to remember the tragic deaths of 1,517 souls than with a crowd-pleasing, toe-tapping musical? Even more ominously, it's an off-West End...
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'Rapture' at the Etcetera Theatre, 10th June 2016
My favourite science fiction takes contemporary issues to extreme yet logical conclusions. The Terminatorlooks at endpoint of increased automation; 1984 explores a truly totalitarian society; District...
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'Buried Alive' at St Giles Church, 13th June 2016
"Among all the torments that Mankind is capable of, the most dreadful of them is to be buried alive." So says The Most Lamentable And Deplorable Accident, a 1661 pamphlet describing the deeply...
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'Gertrude - The Cry' at Theatre N16, 14th June 2016
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Extremely rotten. Gertrude is a nymphomaniac; Hamlet is a grinning idiot that'sbarely able to hold himself together; and Claudius can't help flashing his...
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'Glastonbury Festival 2016'
"If you're worried about the weather / then you picked the wrong place to stay." so sang James Murphy in the closing moments of what was officially the muddiest Glastonbury ever. His audience, who'd...
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'Ugly Lovely' at the Old Red Lion, 29th June 2016
Nostalgia's a funny old thing. During teenage years I desperately looked forward to escaping the black hole of South Wales. The streets were piss-sodden and destitute: studded with boarded up shops,...
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'Screwed' at Theatre503, 40 June 2016
Luce and Charlene spend their days screwing. By day they work in a factory fixing washers to phallic pipes, by night they down equal measures of booze and cock in sweaty nightclubs. Life is grinding...
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'Savage' at Above the Arts Theatre, 1st July 2016
The opening night of Savage began with playwright Claudio Macur reciting a poem about the Pulse nightclub atrocity. It reduced the nightmare down to a repetition of "pulse", the word underlining the...
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'Cut' at the Vaults, 6th July 2016
Being completely enveloped in darkness is liberating. I'm not talking about the mere dimness you find when trying to sleep: the orange glow of streetlights creeping around the edge of the blinds, the...
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'Peter Schlemiel' at Theatre N16, 7th July 2016
What would become of a man whose shadow has been ripped away? This play posits that he'd be shunned, have dirt thrown at him and considered innately suspicious. Just what quality does a shadow bring to...
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'Broad Shadow' at the National Theatre, 7th July 2016
Broad Shadow is a straightforwardly effective play that's ripe with complexity. I see an awful lot of theatre each week and lots of it is pretty goddamn terrible, but this brief n' breezy thirty minute...
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