MARY CONWAY recommends an early Shakespearean tragedy that feels so contemporary that it mirrors our daily news
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A disastrous divide
INDIE PURCELL sees a play on a dystopian future where the sexes are kept separate sink into a chasm of conceptual cliche
Impressive: Erin Doherty as Soween
[Manuel Harlan] 
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by a new play that loses its drama amid the moral dilemma of re-settling children in the aftermath of WWII
Acclaimed as a masterpiece when it premiered, this study of story-telling in an Irish pub more than lives up to expectations, says MARY CONWAY
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes a comedy that dives deep into Liverpool’s divided loyalties
The Divide
The Old Vic, London
YOU'D be forgiven if you walked out of watching Alan Ayckbourn's The Divide vowing never to go to the theatre again.
Cut down from the original six-hour marathon, this four-hour epic dystopian tale, set over 100 years into the future, is full of so many mixed messages and insulting cliches it's hard to grasp Ayckbourn's point.
It's set in a post-apocalyptic society where, following an infectious plague carried by women, the sexes are kept mostly separate. Women live in the south and men in the north, same-sex relationships are the norm, heterosexuality is forbidden and children are the product of artificial insemination.
While the subject matter is sobering and serious, this isn't your run-of-the-mill polemic, write INDIE PURCELL
An absolute must for those who love film and graphic novels, writes INDIANNA PURCELL
