Tag: Xana

Are You Watching? by Georgie Dettmer, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 30 May 2026

Shakespeare it isn’t. Google Flow picture morphing The Bard with Meself.

I was reminded of one of my favourite Peter Cook quotes, when seeing a preview of this one.

I go to the theatre to be entertained… I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction… I can get all that at home.

I also predicted with word perfect accuracy what Janie would say as soon as she felt able to express her opinion on the play:

Everything but the kitchen sink…

…and of course, kitchen sink drama should be what The Royal Court is all about.

I’m being a tad unfair, but only a tad. The core subject matter(s) of this play – sexploitation, sexual violence and the nether worlds where computer/AI fakery morph with human fakery – are hugely important topics in 2026 and worthy of coverage in drama.

The problem I have with a 65 minute long play, depicting 52 (that is not a misprint) different scenes, is that the drama is barely able to emerge through the fog of scene and personnel changes on stage.

It reminded me a bit of Martin Crimp‘s work – but unfortunately the Crimp that baffles us rather than the Crimp that does the business for us.

The actors did their best and several of them are among the best stage actors around at the moment; Lucy McCormick, Maimuna Memon and Nicholas Rowe stood out for me.

This relatively short run has sold out ahead of even opening, so my thoughts on the piece won’t be affecting readers go/no go decisions anyway. In any case, the formal reviews (which are starting to come out and which the search term if you click here will find) are surely less harsh than my and Janie’s judgements.

Georgie Dettmer clearly has a lot to say and is surely capable of saying the things she wants to say through playwriting. I would like to see how she gets on with chunkier scenes, trying to explore some of those dramatic depths.

I go to the theatre to be entertained… I don’t want to see plays that jump around a myriad of important topics at a rate of 50 matters per hour… I can get all that at home.

Word-Play by Rabiah Hussain, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 29 July 2023

The Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square by Stacey Harris, CC BY-SA 2.0

This was our first visit to the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs since before the pandemic. Until then, we were fairly regular visitors to that small space. Our previous visit, in 2019 had been a rare miss for us…

Midnight Movie by Eve Leigh, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 30 November 2019

Word-Play was definitely not a miss for us, far from it, although Janie did find the short scenes with the actors playing different characters in different times and places more than a little disconcerting.

But we both agreed that the acting by all five cast members; Issam Al Ghussain, Kosar Ali, Simon Manyonda, Sirine Saba, and Yusra Warsama, was superb. Many of the scenes worked terrifically well, especially the more intimate ones. Word-Play is a very ambitious piece of writing and we shall certainly look out for Rabiah Hussain’s work again.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resource for this play/production.

This link should find plenty of reviews, most of which are good or very good – one or two not so.

It’s running until late August 2023 and we would certainly recommend this innovative piece of theatre if you get to this page in time to get a ticket.

Strange Fruit by Caryl Phillips, Bush Theatre, 15 June 2019

I have long been a fan of Caryl Phillips‘s writing; I discovered his novels in the mid 1980s and have several of his books in hard cover.

So I was excited to see that he had written a play, although, when I booked Strange Fruit at The Bush, I didn’t realise that it was an early work, written in the early 1980s, prior to the first of the novels.

Here is a link to the Bush resource on this play/production.

Below is the trailer:

I think Janie and I saw a preview, although it is hard to tell at The Bush when press night might be without doing deep research.

In any case, we found the production slick and the acting truly excellent.

Written and set in the early 1980s, the play covers some fascinating aspects of African-Caribbean culture and issues from that time, many of which resonate strongly with issues of migration and identity in our current troubled times.

In truth, the play is somewhat unsubtle, starting in a rather tinny, scene-setting style and tending towards melodrama at the end, in ways that Caryl Phillips clearly ironed out as a writer very soon after writing this play.

But there are flashes of brilliance in the writing and the characters, while somewhat stereotypical, are tragic and engaging.

In fact, the whole piece is engaging throughout; although the play is rather long for the simple story it tells, the piece held our attention throughout.

This is not a play that will cheer you up if you seek some light entertainment. It will make you think about the issues and if you like visceral drama then it is most certainly for you.

Formal reviews, if or when they come, should be available through this link – click here.

Bush Theatre
The Bush Theatre at night. Photo by Guy Bell –
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Bush does not shy away from producing plays of this kind and that’s one of the reasons we like the place so much.

Blood Knot by Athol Fugard, Orange Tree Theatre, 9 March 2019

You wait years for an Athol Fugard to come to London and then, what do you know, two come along at the same time. Like buses, are Athol Fugard plays.

We saw A Lesson From Aloes last week at the Finborough and mighty fine it was too:

A Lesson From Aloes by Athol Fugard, Finborough Theatre, 1 March 2019

Blood Knot at the Orange Tree was also excellent, but if I was only going to see one of these productions, I’d personally choose Aloes, both for the play and for the production.

We saw a preview of Blood Knot, but I think my comments will apply throughout the run.

Blood Knot is a relentlessly grim play. The play is about two half-brothers in Port Elizabeth who are Cape Coloured, to use the hateful vernacular of the South African Apartheid regime. One is light-skinned and could pass for white, while the other is dark-skinned and is more likely to be regarded as black.

The poverty and hopelessness of the brothers’ situation pervades the whole play. The brothers are extremely well portrayed by Nathan McMullen and Kalungi Ssebandeke.

Click here or the picture below for the Orange Tree web resources on this production.

But the play is very slow. Especially the first half. Let’s be honest about this – and I am an Athol Fugard fan saying this – Fugard plays tend to start very slow. Lengthy periods of scene-setting and atmosphere-generating are intrinsic to Fugard’s style.

Blood Knot is especially slow to build. It is an early work and I think Fugard himself would admit that his craft as a playwright improved with experience.

It was a ground-breaking piece in its time; 1961. Fugard himself played Morrie and was testing the boundaries of Apartheid law; loopholes which for a while allowed white and black actors to appear on stage together.

All this and more about the horrible history of racist laws, South African colonialism and the Cape Coloured community are explained in fascinating essays in this production’s programme. I don’t often specifically commend a programme but this one I found hugely informative and interesting.

At the start of the interval, Janie pondered leaving before the second half, but then came round to the idea of seeing the production through.

By the end of the evening, she was really pleased she decided to see the second half – as was I. Still not racey, but the piece makes far more sense as a whole and the second half answers at least some of the questions at a reasonable lick.

Not the very best of Fugard, but still very much worth seeing.