On the day of the election, MARTIN GOLLAN reflects on the perennial relationship between the far-right and the back-hander
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Krampus as camp as Christmas ought to be
Not a Coca Cola Christmas: How to Catch a Krampus
[Ali Wright]
MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
ED WAUGH introduces a special event to commemorate the centenary of the 1926 General Strike
Reviews of Charlotte Cornfield, Michael Weston King, and Gun Outfit
How to Catch a Krampus
Pleasance Theatre, London
HAVING danced the night away at several of its industrial-scale glitterfests, I was curious to see how the international drag collective Sink the Pink would interpret the tale of Krampus — the child-napping half-bogeyman, half-goat of European folklore — in the murky confines of the Pleasance Theatre.
A little sceptical as to whether they could pull it off, I was pleasantly surprised by a production which, written and directed by drag queen Ginger Johnson, truly is “a black-hearted antidote to all things cheery this festive season.”
Set in a Victorian London that's more Hammer Horror than Dickensian, it has a spiritualist-cum-pantomime dame, played by Johnson, who's looking for her cat when she bumps into a desperate mother (Mairi Houston) in search of her missing son.
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