WILL STONE samples the 20th anniversary atmosphere of this eclectic end-of-season indie festival
Latest editorial
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]
Comics are not just superheroes and spandex – it can be public art, telling public stories, suggests HARRIET EARLE
The bard serenades the Diggers of Wigan and their festive followers
ALEXEI SAYLE speaks to Angus Reid about a lifetime of protest, how to hone political art – and what to do now
ANDY HEDGECOCK, JAMES WALSH, LEO BOIX and MARIA DUARTE review Just An Illusion, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Blue Film, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, and Runner
MARIA DUARTE recommends a nerve-wracking reconstruction of the 72 hours before the Normandy landings
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.
Similar stories
![HOW FASCISM BEGAN: Prisoners guarded by SA men line up in the yard of Oranienburg concentration camp, 6 April 1933 [Pic: Public Domain]](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2026-09/weimar%20web1.jpg.webp?itok=vW7SFOwt)
MARJ MAYO recommends an engaging, if chilling, collection of diaries and letters that trace a population's capacity for accommodation with Nazism
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an intriguing multi-layered depiction, dominated by a stunning impersonation of Marilyn herself
Family issues and dragon-fuelled history amount to a vacuous spectacle that ill-fits the theatre, muses SIMON PARSONS
MARY CONWAY applauds the timely revival of Miller’s study of people fatally deformed by the economics of survival