Reviews

The Glass Mountain

As yet unfinished, but already roughly enchanting, The Glass Mountain looks set to be a hopeful, heartfelt and most rewarding journey.

The Mountaintop

More than just a reverent character study of Dr. King, The Mountaintop presents a history with an immediate bearing on the modern world.

S-27

S-27, while committed and sometimes compelling, lacks detail, credibility and grit.

The Moon The Moon

The Moon The Moon is many overlapping things, but never feels like collage; its elements complement rather than contradict one another.

Read more reviews

Articles

Between Gallery and Performance: Punchdrunk & Tim Crouch

What do Punchdrunk’s Tunnel 228 and Tim Crouch’s England have in common? They rethink the relationship between artwork and gallery space through interdisciplinary performance.

Wall - a response

In Wall, David Hare conjures a vision of the future; drawing on history that is being written as we speak, his journies make faraway lands feel less distant, less foreign than we’d have them be.

Theatre and the Internet - a brief history

How has the theatre responded to the last two decades of Internet growth?

Lyn Gardner and the dark art of search engine logic

Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance. The backbone of new media is not the content but the code.

Read more articles

Interviews

Fairground

I stood there with the camera to my eye, watching, waiting, lowering it from time to time to check the screen.

Mike Tweddle on directing Hippolytus

They’re such brilliant, simple stories, these Greek stories’, he continues, ‘but they often get clouded in a mist of incomprehensibility.

Read more interviews

The Glass Mountain

Jun 18
2009
Stephe HarropStephe Harrop
(More info)
Category
Artsdepot, Reviews
Comments
0

In a coach ploughing its way across a darkened continent, a young baker fantasises about his future in a new country. A girl scrambles up a ladder to the top of a glass mountain, perched precariously between one life and another. The Glass Mountain, a work-in-development from Trestle Theatre, mixes the outline and images of a traditional fairy tale with the stories of modern-day Polish migrants. Combining half-abstracted physical storytelling,…

Click here to continue reading »

The Mountaintop

Jun 17
2009
Matt BoothmanMatt Boothman
(More info)
Category
New Writing, Reviews, Theatre503
Comments
0

In this imagining of Martin Luther King Jr’s last night alive, award-winning young American playwright Katori Hall boldly combines hard historical fact and in-depth character study with a comparatively barmy supernatural twist. It’s a volatile concoction that could corrode the credibility of a lesser play, but which instead provides an already dynamic production with a surging second-stage boost. The man in the King’s shoes is David Harewood, who seems to…

Click here to continue reading »

S-27

Jun 15
2009
Stephe HarropStephe Harrop
(More info)
Category
Finborough, Reviews
Comments
0

Winner of the 2007 Protect the Human Playwriting Competition, S-27 by Sarah Grochala is inspired by the experiences of photographer Nhem En, painter Van Nath, and the testimony of Khmer Rouge survivors. In what was once a classroom, teenager May photographs prisoners. Starved and brutalised, they enter by one door and leave by another, beyond which lie inescapable horrors. Oddly, however, the set of Stephen Keyworth’s production contains no practical doors.…

Click here to continue reading »

The Moon The Moon

Jun 10
2009
Matt BoothmanMatt Boothman
(More info)
Category
Reviews, Southwark Playhouse
Comments
1

The Moon The Moon explores, with harrowing psychological realism, our ability to harm one another even with the best of intentions. Attempting to cure the Man (Jon Spooner, who also directs) of a suicidal malaise, the Young Woman (Suzanne Ahmet) and the Older Man (Tim Chipping) progress, always with a genuine desire to do good, from an over-anxious suicide watch to drugging, incarceration and worse. The Moon The Moon explores, with…

Click here to continue reading »

Ajax

Jun 08
2009
Stephe HarropStephe Harrop
(More info)
Category
Greek Tragedy, Reviews, Riverside Studios
Comments
0

Ajax is a tragedy of aftermaths, beginning the morning after a furious and devastating bloodletting. Enraged by a slight to his honour, Ajax attempts to murder the Greek military commanders camped outside Troy. But maddened by Athena he instead turns his sword upon their sheep and cattle, and then, in humiliated shame, upon himself. The First World War setting of Jack Shepherd’s naturalistic production makes it all seem frighteningly possible. In…

Click here to continue reading »

All’s Well That Ends Well

May 30
2009
Matt BoothmanMatt Boothman
(More info)
Category
National Theatre, Reviews, Shakespeare
Comments
10

All’s Well That Ends Well is supposedly one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, though you wouldn’t guess that from Marianne Elliott’s production at the National (the third of this year’s Travelex £10 ticket plays). Apparently, the play’s usual flaw is Bertram, the male romantic lead. When the King of France forcibly weds him to Helena, in return for her curing him of a fistula, Bertram’s reaction is one of extreme distaste. He…

Click here to continue reading »

Werter, Werter

May 29
2009
Diana DamianDiana Damian
(More info)
Category
Fringe, Reviews, Roundhouse Theatre
Comments
0

Playful, macabre and inventive, Werter, Werter is an interpretation of Wolfgang Goethe’s famous autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther; created and performed by Ján Mikuš of The Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, Czech Republic. Written in the form of letters from Werther to his friend Wilhelm, the novel recounts the tragic downfall of a young artist consumed by unrequited love and driven to suicide. Ján Mikuš…

Click here to continue reading »

Rotating in a Room of Images

May 23
2009
Matt BoothmanMatt Boothman
(More info)
Category
BAC, Fringe, Participatory, Reviews, Sound
Comments
1

If you’re interested in audio-instructed performance, Battersea Arts Centre is the place to go. Their Forest Fringe Previews allowed a few lucky participants to experience Rotozaza’s then-unfinished GuruGuru, and their BURST festival, running until 30 May, includes not only more Rotozaza work but also Rotating in a Room of Images by Swedish artists Lundahl and Seitl. In audio-instructed productions, unrehearsed members of the public are given headphones that deliver prerecorded…

Click here to continue reading »

Wondermart

May 22
2009
Matt BoothmanMatt Boothman
(More info)
Category
BAC, Participatory, Reviews, Rotozaza, Site Specific
Comments
4

When I described Rotozaza’s Wondermart to a friend, his reaction was: “That’s not theatre, that’s creating a public nuisance.” The production continues the company’s work with audio-instructed performance and develops the site-specific element introduced in Etiquette. The site: the ASDA down the road from Battersea Arts Centre. Participants wired up with headphones and mp3 players are released in pairs into the supermarket, where a voice guides them gently through the aisles…

Click here to continue reading »

Between Gallery and Performance: Punchdrunk & Tim Crouch

May 21
2009
Diana DamianDiana Damian
(More info)
Category
Articles, Punchdrunk, Tim Crouch
Comments
0

The smell of the river rises from the damp brick walls and wet ceilings. The floors are uneven and a misty light makes the size of this space hard to grasp. My ears pick up sounds, soft and shrill, from all around. I step closer to a mausoleum of diffracted light, it’s Luke Montgomery’s Heaven on Earth - I discover later on. The deeper I go into this cavern, the more…

Click here to continue reading »

Archives

Sort posts by

Connect with LTB

Resources

Practical and scholarly theatre links, podcasts, blogs, cheap tickets and more.
See resource page »

Interactive Maps


Visit our map page »

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Close
E-mail It