Rev Stan's Theatre Blog
London theatre reviews and interviews
Category: Soho theatre
-
Plays with multimedia can feel a bit gimmicky and therefore disappointing, but this isn’t the case with This is Not About Me at the Soho Theatre. Written by Hannah Caplan, it’s a two-hander about friends who have tipped over into ‘with benefits’ on three occasions, which threatens their friendship. They are opposites who somehow fit…
-
If you could age in reverse and go back to a younger age simply by taking a pill, would you? And would you do anything differently? This is the premise of Rea Dennhardt Patel’s play The Undying at the Soho Theatre. Amba (Vaishnavi Survaprakash) and Prav (Akaash Dev Shemar) are in their 90s and have…
-
Julia McDermott in Weather Girl. Credit: Pamela Raith Photography The character in Brian Watkins' monologue play Weather Girl is called Stacey (Julia McDermott) which was slightly disconcerting because that's my real name (Stan is a nickname), and it's not the sort of name usually used for stage characters. But, the fact that it is disconcerting…
-
Santi (Aiyana Bartlett & Naz (Farah Ashraf). Photo: Paul Blakemore Santi & Naz at Soho Theatre is a teenage friendship story set against the backdrop of the run-up to Partition. Santi (Aiyana Bartlett) is Sikh, loves books and has eyes for a young man in the village who may not be what she thinks he…
-
Neil John Gibson and Gillian Dean in Don't Make Tea © photographer – Andy Catlin Don't Make Tea at the Soho Theatre is one of those plays that, if you wrote down all the elements, you'd think 'this isn't going to work' but somehow, on stage, it does. It's the latest production from Birds of…
-
Jadesola Odunjo and Leah St Luce in FLIP! © Tristram Kenton One of the challenges theatre has when it looks at life for Gen Z (and Millenials) is how to represent the digital world on stage. Modern communication is often embedded in texts, Whatsapps and DMs. Commentary is in social media posts and comments. Racheal…
-
Aimée Kelly in Boy Parts at Soho Theatre (c) Joe Twigg Photography When I interviewed director Sara Joyce about Boy Parts, how she talked about the central character in Boy Parts immediately piqued my interest. She describes Irina (Aimée Kelly) as not immediately likeable but that her story is nonetheless compelling. This 'pitch-black psychological thriller'…
-
On a bus carrying people fleeing a war-torn country, a man (Jerome Ngonadi) takes a boy (Eve Von Elgg) under his wing. When they arrive in the country where they seek refuge, the assumption is they are father and son, and the man plays along, deciding it is better they stick together. Joakim Daun's play…
-
L-R Sara Joyce with fellow Boy Parts creatives: Aimée Kelly (actor), Gill Greer (adaptation) and Eliza Clark (novel). Photo: Rebecca Need-Menear Theatre director Sara Joyce's previous work includes Dust by Milly Thomas and Fringe First winning The Last Return. Here she talks about her new project, Boy Parts, what drew her to working in the…