EWAN CAMERON picks out two fascinating music shows, fusing the Korean, and the Celtic, with the modern
Shock tactics fail to generate empathy
SIMON PARSONS recommends a thought-provoking play about the long-term impact of traumatic childhoods and the morality of accepting the rehabilitation of social outcasts
POWERFUL ACTING: Abigail Hood as Kayleigh Grey and Emma Keele as Rebecca Hastie
[Ben Wilkin]
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
Monster
Park Theatre
ABIGAIL HOOD’S well-constructed naturalistic drama opens with two teenage Glaswegian girls hanging out, flirting and fantasising after school on a patch of wasteland, symbolic of their lives.
The Monster, played by Hood, is Kayleigh — a bright, bitter and damaged youngster whose home life with an abusive mother on the game is a living nightmare.
When her girlfriend finally deserts her for a boy, her instinctive response is an appalling act of violence towards the only adult who has paid her any attention.
Similar stories
SIMON PARSONS applauds the timely revival of a play about solidarity and betrayal within Britain’s Pakistani community
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective