Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Best of 2018: Theatre
by LYNNE WALSH
Learning curve: Dermot Crowley and Judith Roddy in Translations Pic: Catherine Ashmore
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
Peter Mitchell's photography reveals a poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
IN LONDON, there’s been a lot of loss in theatrical themes this year, and a lot of theft.
In the stupendous Exodus at the Finborough from writer and director Rachael Boulton and her trailblazing company Motherlode, there was a loss of hope, future and self-esteem while the theft of language and a community’s sense of its own history was ever-present in Brian Friel’s Translations at the National Theatre.
In it, Ciaran Hinds dominated the stage as the charismatic Latinate scholar Hugh, claiming that the lyrical and sometimes mendacious Irish language was “our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes,” while in Ella Hickson’s The Writer at the Almeida there is loss of a woman’s identity and purpose with Romola Garai as the eponymous playwright coming across as uncertain, neurotic and passive.
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