Partially Obstructed View

“The show is just as successful at recreating the oppressive atmosphere of the Cold War.”

“Tatenda Shamiso's production is a slow burn that pays off in parts...”

“The show is much stronger and more atmospheric when it's a play with music bolstering the story than when it tries to foreground it.”

“This is a play that keeps you hopeful it might turn a corner, but which invariably does so in the wrong direction.”

“There's a great energy to it, and the final confrontation in which Colin Ryan's village idiot Benoit plays a major part, feels a lot clearer than I remember it.”

“Affluenza feels like an experiment in how many different ways you can sabotage a single script...”

“But if individual parts are great, the whole really doesn't have any greater depth than just ‘privileged people can be really weird,’ and when something's got so little to say the jokes really have to come a lot thicker and faster than they do here.”

“This is well worth catching, very funny, moving without going in for manipulation, and universal in its specificity.”

“The attempts at something more serious feel a lot flimsier though, and where I would normally enjoy an ambiguous ending, after an evening that's skirted around saying much of substance it feels like a cop-out.”

“In Ailin Conant's production this is a funny, frantic and sometimes moving show - it doesn't really lean into the horror aspect much but it does flash a couple of creepy images along the way.”

“The Standard of Living makes as good an argument as anyone can for the theories of a man whose economics were driven by the first question he asked anyone new he met: ‘What is a good life?’”

“The chemistry between Blaney and Martin is the kind that really plays on this tension, and gives Harry Burton's production a restless comic energy...”

“Elliott and her cast more than justify it - and make the evening fly by faster than many shorter shows I've seen.”

“There's a lot going right here but at the centre of it all is Shalam stepping up to the challenge...”

“So Golden Boy , as Yates delivers it at least, is a pretty strange experience - a great piece of theatre and an absorbing couple of hours well worth seeing, that still leaves you with no illusion that the raw material was any kind of masterpiece.”

“It makes the play's argument about the twisted morality of the survivor beautifully, the trouble is there's another 90 minutes of Stephen Unwin's expressionistic production around it.”

“Wilkinson's play is generally strong although it can't quite decide how naturalistic it wants to be...”

“Given it's more often than not the thing I complain about the most, perhaps the most impressive thing about Raymond's script is that he's kept the whole thing in rhyming couplets and made it work for the entire length of the play.”

“One thing The Story does very well is balance its racial politics - taking in both the wider tensions and violence, and the experience particularly of female black journalists trying to make a career - with the thriller that's built around it, and the growing suspicion that the real sociopath might be right in the middle of the story.”

“All things told this is an entertaining evening that sticks pretty closely to the original without entirely justifying its musical expansion...”

“But a bit too much of it is riding on pure camp, and while it’s always entertaining and well-performed by a surprisingly large cast for a fringe venue, it doesn’t quite have the consistency to elevate it from a worth-a-look to a must-see.”

“Where it falters though is in pulling all of these potential threads together.”

“The downside of focusing so strongly on the homoeroticism and physicality of the story is that the part where it bleeds into a twisted sense of religion isn't as much under the spotlight, and Stephens' Dysart isn't distinct enough in his own mental breakdown to make us see how this is important.”

“Its frenetic energy and leaping from storytelling style to storytelling style is impressive but also exhausting to watch.”

“The final big scare is telegraphed strongly enough that it works as a cathartic big laugh rather than horror...”

“Jordan Fein's production won't change that it's still probably the most entertaining one I've seen.”

“The trouble is all these bells and whistles are there because they absolutely need to be: The script itself is as thin as the cast is buff.”

“The show might have leaned into its own hype, but its confidence turns out to be justified.”

“The show's worth seeing for this 'pre-credits' sequence alone, but do stick around for the rest of it.”

“Unfortunately picking holes in the story is about all the entertainment a dull, lifeless play has to offer.”

“The trouble is if the theme is inertia it needs a lot else to keep it interesting and I could never quite get my head round what The Brightening Air was actually trying to be.”

“So a mixed evening - there's definitely a fun premise here, and in stark contrast to Elektra a sense of embracing a new audience without either patronising them or talking over their heads.”

“Ali herself has no such problem, as she keeps the laughs coming in a way that effortlessly show us the characters and community she wants us to share in.”

“But if I found the overall effect a little cold, many individual elements are full of charm, especially in the stagecraft used.”

“In attempting to be both a biographical piece trying to understand the relationship between two of the Brontës, and a broadly comic, irreverent deconstruction of them, Underdog ends up being neither.”

“Blue Mist is a strong playwriting debut that for the most part balances its serious point with very entertaining comic one-liners.”

“This weird, dusty vanity project gives the distinct impression that, unless he's actually been on stage himself, SirKenBran hasn't set foot in a theatre in the last 30 (or possibly 130) years.”

“But if it is something of a curate's egg, at least it's an entertainingly weird one.”

“Corrin certainly takes us on a fun ride along the way.”

“One of those productions I find more interesting to unpack than actually to watch, Dyer's take on the play is meticulously thought-out in terms of intent, but stylistically could have done with more variety of sound and vision to really push the story forward.”

“Khan knows the right notes to hit to ensure it still works as well today, while also giving the production enough of its own flavour to make it worth revisiting.”

“The moments that make a young audience gasp make Frozen earn its place on the stage.”