If theatre is a live product then Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet is a wake-up call to British directors who continually present the undead of theatre – the sort of theatre that merely plays before its audience, offering a slice of ‘British dramatic life’ in two hours. The audience relax in the darkness of the auditorium and [...]

Imagine Rowan Atkinson fused with Sarkozy and you’d come close to envisaging the eccentric little man who giggles, grimaces, whines and whinnies over the stage as thirty years of marital angst are thrashed out. Loïc Rojouan plays this exasperated politician at loggerheads with a not-so-longsuffering wife (Violaine Atimont), who lets him know exactly what a [...]

Laurin Campbell says: Where better to explore issues of hierarchy and construct than the theatre? Talal Mahmoud’s The Play highlights the prevalence of predefined roles and male dominance in Arab cultures, using the stage as an allegory. Whilst referencing examples of female exploitation through arranged marriages, physical abuse and misogynistic notions of the woman as [...]

In Nidal Al Atway’s play Al Jabra, a group of young teens have dared each other to enter an abandoned warehouse at night. When one of them slams the door in which they came into the building, they are stuck inside the warehouse until someone finds a way out, or they are shown the way [...]