Tag Archives: immigration

Europe

Donmar Theatre, London ****

Runs: 2hrs 20 mins incl 15 min interval
Review of perf seen July 1, 2019:

© Marc Brenner; Theo Barklem-Biggs (Horse), Stephen Wight (Billy), Billy Howle (Berlin), Kevork Malikyan (Sava), Natalia Tena (Katia) - immigrants and residents clashing up against each other...

© Marc Brenner; Theo Barklem-Biggs (Horse), Stephen Wight (Billy), Billy Howle (Berlin), Ron Cook (fret), Kevork Malikyan (Sava), Natalia Tena (Katia) – immigrants and residents clashing up against each other…

How fascinating to see David Greig’s Europe again twenty-five years on from its premiere. What was Greig thinking about, I wonder, when he first wrote Europe in 1994? – a landscape so far distant from our own in 2019 in terms of optimism in a play also now so prescient of the violence that immigration has unleashed on Europe reigniting the rise of neo fascism barely fifty years after the war that many must have thought had crushed it forever.  Continue reading

Summer Rolls

Park Theatre, London ****
Runs: 2hrs with an interval
Review of perf seen June 24, 2019
© Dante Kim, Michael Phong-Le (Anh) and Linh-Dan Pham (Mother), exposing family secrets from the past...

© Dante Kim, Michael Phong-Le (Anh) and Linh-Dan Pham (Mother), exposing family secrets from the past…

Another milestone, another account of lost stories come to light. Summer Rolls is the first Vietnamese play to have been produced in London and a mark of a growing sense of confidence by its two young producers, Tuyen Do, Summer Rolls’ author and Tuyet Huynh, who only set up their production company, VãnThanh Productions a year ago. Continue reading

The Lehman Trilogy

Lyttelton, National Theatre, London ****

© Mark Douet, Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman - the three Lehman Brothers: Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley

© Mark Douet, Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman – the three Lehman Brothers: Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley

The cast would be worth the ticket alone, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley. They could read the old-fashioned telephone directory and still make it sound significant. Continue reading

What Shadows

Park Theatre, London (***)

© Mihaela Bodlovic, Ian McDiarmid as Enoch Powell delivering his `River Tiber' speech in 1968

© Mihaela Bodlovic, Ian McDiarmid as Enoch Powell delivering his `River Tiber’ speech in 1968. In the background, Amelia Donkor as `black’ academic Rose Cruickshank.

`Rivers of blood’, as Enoch Powell’s Birmingham speech in 1968 about immigration was famously dubbed. Except he never really said that. Like so much else we call history, it was a moniker adopted by the press out of an illusion the politician, fond of quoting from classic scholars made: `like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ Yanked out of context, it stuck. Continue reading

Screens

Theatre503, London (****)

© Pank Sethi, Fisun Burgess (Emine - mum), Nadia Hynes as Ayse, her daughter, Declan Perring, Al

© Pank Sethi, Fisun Burgess (Emine – mum), Nadia Hynes as Ayse, her daughter, Declan Perring, Al

Stephen Laughton (ex-Royal Court Writers Group, Headlong emerging writers programme) and author of acclaimed Run at the Vaults Festival has pedigree and doesn’t disappoint with his latest, Screens aptly turning up at Theatre503 just as who we are, and what we are bears down heavily on the national psyche. Continue reading