Words are to be used as tools, not vessels.
A character portrait of an enigmatic psychopath-killer as he navigates his incarceration in a high security hospital and strikes an unlikely friendship with Dave, a “weaker” man whose wife he has been exchanging erotic letters with. Dripping with wisdom and wit, Martin’s character inhabits his body with precision and poise as he dances through melodically composed scenographies always threatening to erupt into violences lurking around the edges. In terms of discourse, the play did little more than surface the existing sentiments against a system which brands these men as rabid dogs, incapable of change or hope – and is surprised when they act like animals – but the real insight it offered was in the embodied encounter with the calculative power-obsessed rationality of a mind unmoved by connection or empathy seeing us for what we are; faces projecting interest, postures disguising weakness, laughable, soft-bellied, embarrassable, pathetic. As the drama draws to a close, the characters’ fates play out independently and it concludes in a moment of rich, moving intimacy when Martin thanks Dave for his friendship, peeling off the mask of the unmovable psychopath the play imprinted on him thus far to reveal the humanness within; capable of hope, warmth and softness just like any of us.

An absolutely horrifying piece of theatre charting the language of shame in an aged Anglo-Indian woman and her two adult children against the backdrop of their childhood home after their father falls fatally ill. Through a medley of inflamed responses of denial, addiction and accusation, the 3 protagonists paint brutally accurate portraits of the emotional cripples that traumatic shame can make out of us – the toxic collages of memories that shame becomes within us and the compulsive fixations that we fragment into to protect ourselves from its poison. The play was set alight by the frictions between the 3 characters and their humiliating memories of childhood abuse in this bungalow, and it has been a long time since I've witnessed acting so utterly convincing; so completely grounded in the reality of actions being done. Space was created in an improvised fashion – characters suggested imaginary objects and moving between different parts of the house in shorthand. The entire bungalow was folded up onto a tiny stage, which worked well to concentrate the weight of their unspoken memories and create an aesthetic of suffocation. By pulling us in to complete the stage picture for ourselves, the play managed to secure itself squarely within our imagination, right under our skin; drawing out instinctual, primal pities in response to moments of climatic breakdown. Traces of Indianness were written into the characters with subtle precision and embodied to perfection, and relating with them directly made the play that much more unsettling for me. This is the kind of theatre that might never pack a house completely because it creates an energy that is simply too visceral, too disturbingly real – but it is exactly this sort of thing that only in the theater can we truly encounter, identify or make some sense of.

A visually and acoustically stunning rendition of Tennessee Williams’ classic play about desire and decision. Sprawled across a bare set that seems like a construction site turned into a living room, the script’s instruction that the play is memory was taken very seriously in all aspects of the scenography and direction. Scenes bled into each other, the stage bled into the auditorium, snippets of emotionally charged dialogues were played back as the characters spoke the words, they moved around the stage non-naturalistically – forming expressive shapes and occasionally breaking into song and dance. The action was constantly back-dropped by shifting ambient colours and melodies as it is in our memory. Scenes were fundamentally rooted in naturalistic exchanges but were framed by surreal spatial relationships with the other characters around the stage – whether they were dancing in the background or simply watching the scene with us. Lingering presences created an alienating effect, separating different threads of the narrative and allowing each character’s progression to overlap and run parallel in one immersive mental chamber. This theme of alienation was also taken further as a framing device in the second act, which began and ended with Tom monologuing directly to the audience by means of a hand-held mic; emphasising the distance between his position as a narrator and the other characters’ position of being trapped within the world of the play – left behind in his memory. At its core, the play came alive through the actors’ persuasive physicalities – Tom’s performance of frustration and intimacy with his mother; Amanda’s concern for her elder daughter; and most crucially, Laura’s impeccably subtle performance of shame, attraction and anxiety and her solitary engagement with the glass menagerie. This play was wholly irresistible in its integration of aspects of traditional character-heavy domestic drama with the totalising grip of immersive theatre. By virtue of the play’s “cruelty” in the jarring use of strobe lighting effects, vertical heights and head-bop music beats – raised by the Yard Theatre’s unapologetic “roughness” with its curtain-less interval and handwritten tickets – I was constantly reminded of Peter Brook’s words about the Rough theatre: this is the theatre of noise, and the theatre of noise is the theatre of applause.

A play about a woman in Gaza, waiting for the bombs to fall over her head. It was an approach to war theatre entirely stripped of politics, situated within the immediacy of 1 victim’s suffering. Performed in a sort of direct encounter with the audience, the actor was already present on stage as the audience entered, “waiting” for the play to start. There is an intensity to 1-actor plays in the uninterrupted attention of every mind in the room on just one figure’s movements and speech, and A Knock on the Roof exploited this by creating a “dance” of physical actions following the story that the woman was narrating.
The play was set in just 1 chair on a bare stage; framed by a projection plane the entire height of the room at the back and sides of the stage. During war-time in Gaza, Mariam tells us, the enemy sends a knock on the roof 15 minutes before bombing your building to give you the chance to run away as far as you can. The plot follows Mariam as she practises a 5-minute run day after day, taking only her son and her essentials – and this relationship with her son in a life that she never wanted as a mother or a wife becomes the source of all of the play’s intimacy. There are also moments with her mother – a role that she slips into – and moments of nostalgia. The play was ultimately a pretty comprehensive portrait of this woman’s entire domestic and mental landscape in this state of being simultaneously desensitised to and terrified by the perpetual threat of a knock on the roof. Lighting effects, colours and the use of spotlights was designed masterfully to create shifting perspectives of closeness and distance, activity and passivity all throughout the play. The play started with all the house lights on and ended with an effect of the entire theater’s power being cut. Scene elements like shadow-figures, projections indicating place and dust falling from the ceiling were raised to gigantic proportions, raising the threat of this wide-open space crumbling on top of her to an almost cosmic level. This was balanced well by the comfort she sought directly from the auditorium; instructing the sound director at different points and directly confronting the audience as a friend and a confidant. During the rising action, I was occasionally thrown off by the mismatch between the narration and the enactment of the franticness of her terror and anxiety; almost making her seem like a narrator of another woman’s experience at points. Although there were moments of slack that allowed the mind to wander and register such impressions, any complaint I had with the play’s reality was shattered completely as the play ruptured from a descriptive to an expressive idiom; flowing through a peaceful ceasefire followed by an actual knock on the roof, a final 5-minute run, the complicated joy of finally being “freed” from this state of waiting and waiting and waiting – leaving behind the dichotomy of narrator/character altogether in the immediate horror of her complete, devastating tragedy.

A memory play, unravelling a woman’s life story from an adulthood as a yoga teacher to a childhood in the holocaust – and back to the present. The play was immersive and took a few interesting decisions – the woman is played by 2 actors; an older woman (W2) who greets the audience and makes chit chat as they enter, and a younger woman (W1) who is locked in a yoga position this entire while. This distance between 2 figures portraying the same woman at different points of time allows for a very interesting space of dialogue within the dialectics of the woman’s life.
We enter the play in the form of a meditation class as it guides us to close our eyes, focus on breathing, picture someone we love, and hold them in our “heart of hearts” – shifting gears into the woman’s relationship with her guru (a role W1 slips into). Though this exercise was executed too hurriedly to allow for genuine meditative experience, it was a powerful anchor into the play and made me wonder what places we might be able to take audiences to through a threshold of this form.
Further, the music of the piece is performed diegetically by a 3rd “actor,” a musician seated on stage with the actors with a clarinet and an accordion. This allows him to step in as a 3rd role when required and completes the symmetry of the stage picture well.
The play was staged in an expressive field of imagination, shifting from a meditation room to a playground to a bunker, with traces of physical forms of yoga, childhood anxiety, fear during the holocaust, adolescent desires, and “release” from resentment. This space of physical imagination flowed well but was restricted to W1 while W2 remained primarily a “narrator”, an audience to W1, and occassionally a scene partner. There was perhaps an opportunity here to explore the old-aged versions of W1’s physicalisations with a deeper sense of integration by creating some kind of parallels between the two womens’ actions. W1 was realised well as a character in a few spectacular moments of energetic flow, triumph. Distances and contact between W1 and W2 created intimacies varying rhythmically, and the play climaxes with a closing of this distance in an embrace of the two women.

An imaginative condensation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm for the stage focussed on bringing out the key political dynamics at play. The story was told through moments of private confidences and public confrontations, under overarching images as they unfold (the owner of the farmhouse, the windmill & the laws). The play came alive in its moments of confrontation – the stage lit to present figures as their silhouettes in crowded stage pictures, moving in slow motion, converging into decisive actions.
The acting had some “deadly” elements to it in the over-playing of some of the monologues and conversations. The portrayal of animals in human forms gave it an interesting texture with its flashes of instinctual reactions and aggressions of a deeper, animal nature, but I do wish this had been realised further.

A thoroughly enjoyable domestic drama that unravels a deeply personal conflict of identities within the 2 protagonists, a black married couple who recently moved into the wealthy neighbourhood of Stillwater in South Africa. The play draws firstly from the tension between two houses – the protagonists’ newly purchased house and an “unlawfully” constructed shack that recently emerged in a plot of land next to their white neighbours’ house, and whose anxiety towards these unknown, unseen, probably black settlers becomes the driving force behind the play. It draws secondly from the tension between the house’s value on the market and the social value that it holds for the protagonists as a token of their success, indicating that they’re the “tolerable” kind of black folk. The drama is orchestrated by another white couple, older residents of Stillwater, who visit their home to coax them into becoming the signatories of an eviction order against the mysterious settlers. The play moves at an energised tempo, couching its comedy in a raised pitch of friendly neighbourliness, and occassionally punctures its tempo with suspended moments of frightened silence when confronted with a deeper race prejudice. The space that these silences carve out later erupts into explosive asides where the black couple play with the absurdities of performing blackness in successful “white” spaces. The play then strings these surreal moments back into the diegesis in later scenes in form of violent domestic arguments, climaxing with the male protagonist breaking down into a native song, revealing a deeply held longing for some kind of return, and the play finally converges on a unanswered question; does he sign the order or does he not?

An elegantly composed 2-hander that flows for the whole hour without a moment’s slack. The stage is set in a young couple’s bedroom with a queen sized bed in the middle, and the actors are already in position, asleep in the bed, the audience enters. What follows is an insomniac hour-long conversation in the wee hours of the morning – before a friend’s funeral – exploring avenues at the edges of their relationship that they rarely get the occasion to address.
The play flows through riveting details in gesture, expression and reactions and it refuses to let you look away for the whole hour – which seemed necessary for it to guide us down the sudden shifts and turns in the tone of the conversation from confrontational to comfortable. By the same token, I did find myself craving moments of stillness in between all the gesticulation that might have allowed intimate gestures to speak louder and might have strengthened the naturalism of the play. That said, the physical flow of action was composed and executed smoothly without a hint of awkwardness or absence.
The sudden shifts in conversational tone left emotional threads unresolved, to be picked up again later, and the tension of unfinished fragments of the conversation worked to hook the audience into the unfolding narrative well – and also created a pleasant back and forth of accusation and play. A tense moment of raw authenticity in Leila’s monologue about her anxiety of passing time, arriving at “I’m scared / Of what? / Of fading away” is released by an uproar of laughter – which quickly transitions into a playful sequence of singing a song together – ending with Tom breaking down over an accusation made earlier that he doesn’t love her the way she needs to be loved. The frame was alternatingly expanding and deepening through these two threads of action and the play meandered through some very accurate observations and comments on the condition of love – of loving and of being loved. Some of these rose to become narrative themes: the idea that as we grow into a relationship, our differences slowly get more forefronted until they become core to our identities in that relationship (“you’re the depressed one, I’m the anxious one” ) – and then it reaches a point where we are holding these masks up to each other, setting ourselves in stone as opposites, even though they might not be who we are anymore.
One decisive moment that landed with a high pitch of viciousness was when Tom, in a moment of hopelessness, tells Leila that she isn’t a narcissist, but worse than a narcissist, a solipsist; no one else exists to her and she’s arguing with him purely for drama, because she’s bored, like a girl playing with her dollies in her bedroom. Leila’s memory of how she would try to maintain a diary as a child but would rip out a page after writing it if she wasn’t satisfied, and ended up ripping out every page until all she had was the spine of a book was another strong image that landed in deep parallel with her life – which Tom contested sincerely. This was perhaps the best thing about the play – it was self-aware of the imagery and themes it was introducing, and the characters themselves questioned the validity of their conceptions of themselves and their relationship; taking that weight off the audience. This was perhaps most clearly illustrated in the question of whether or not Tom is listening to Leila’s ramblings at all – which remained ambiguous in the acting as well as the speech – and was a recurring subject of discussion.
It was ultimately a play about the places the imagination might go to in the “safe” confines of a relationship; about the idea that to be listened to is to be loved; and about how obsessions cripple our personalities. The acting did not physicalise the workings of the imagination as much as it could have; Leila delivered rambling speeches filled with anxious wonderings on the nature of time and love, but her body failed to penetrate the text completely in the ways thinking itself is an active, bodied experience – with variations in pitch and tempo, flowing irregularly through pulsations of excitation and confusion. The portrayal of anxiety – 3 years into a relationship – without a core sense of wonder – presented only half the story – and made the relationship feel like a younger, more immature place than they both seemed to believe it was. It felt grounded in the text rather than in the reality of the thoughts being thought and spoken.  Within the multi-threaded back and forth of the play, this gave the flow of her emotion from one progression to the next a bit of a mechanical, directed feel in the moments of highest dramatic weight and it was in these moments that Leila revealed herself as pretend rather than genuine hurt, longing or lust. In contrast, Tom’s portrayals of rage and defeat came together with the text almost magically at a few points of bone-chilling reality.
The play was bookended by a friend’s funeral that the couple had to attend the following morning and surrounding all the domestic discourse, this was what the plot was truly about; Tom had an unexplained guilt towards his friend’s death, which until the climax had appeared in only a few traces of ambiguous defensiveness (“My friend Tony?” / “My friend Tony!”). I found myself regretting that I hadn’t seen a more dramatised picture of this guilt earlier in the play in his withdrawals or responses to Leila, though that was perhaps the intention to make for a stronger climax. Tom appeared only as a secondary presence, a mirror to illuminate Leila, until the relevation at the ending that he was lying about some details of his relationship with his friend before he died.
As the play reached its ending it was forced to resolve its various threads and it chose to do so in a manner of making huge revelations of the plot, but obscuring substantial details by presenting only fragments of interactions. What resulted was a form of absurdism that plays the effect rather than the cause – ie. how an event makes the character feel rather than revealing what the event itself is and exploits that ambiguous space to leap into focused emotional intensities. What this play leapt to was an exaggerated display of guilt; Tom falling to his knees and begging her not to leave him – the kind of pathetic longing that we descend to only after having done something truly horrible. This was followed soon after by sex – on which the play closed – and which seemed to resolve this drama of contrasts softly, with balance. I do wonder however what more could have been achieved in that use of absurdism if there had been a surreal leap into monologues with a fragmenting rationality – loosely in the way characters descend into a broken poetry of “senselessness” at the ends of plays by Crimp or Pinter that resolve some of the foremost dialogue and imagery. Instead, 1001 chose to remain safe within its naturalistic diegesis, and resolved its conversation in the totalising effect of Tom’s desperation – rendering all the preceding conversation as abstract pretense when faced with the honesty of his final “don’t leave me” – and all that’s left to do is fuck.
What this play most clearly offers is perhaps its sincere pursuit of the aesthetic of honest intimacy  – in the tone of naturalism the play strikes, in the characters’ engagement with each other and in the feeling that the play desired the audience – gripping our gaze so completely. I wonder how this might have been realised even further if the audience were seated in a circular arrangement surrounding the stage from all sides instead, or at a level slightly lower than the actors.

A staged reading of a collection of short plays by an ensemble of black actors, directors, writers the day before their opening. An enjoyable event overall, it was a deeply cultural encounter for me; an evening with a variety of familiar figures from a foreign culture – a blind salesman, an ex-inmate at a DMV office, a gay daughter and her mother, a policewoman and an ex-convict at a bar and so on – offering flashes of sharp insight, intense intimacies and outraged laughter.

A historic portrait of Jacob Schiff, a Jewish American banker and philanthropist, who having heard of Jewish massacres in the Russian Empire, declares himself a personal enemy of the Russian Czar. The play presents a range of historical figures from Mark Twain to President Roosevelt in dialogue with each other, against an intensely decorated backdrop of the President’s office on one end, Jacob Shiff’s on the other, and through a range of forms from projected shadows to addresses to the audience to encounters between characters. The forms came together as scenic poetry well and saved the play from being a dry academic space, raising it into an assembly of aspirational ideas. It was a dialogue play; all the action unfolded through conversation; and though the play held a lot of conflicting ideas from vastly different perspectives, the friction came alive in direct confrontations very sparsely, which gave it dignity at the expense of interest. In the midst of the slightly repetitive stretched out conversations, I found myself thinking perhaps there was some way to either give the play a “thicker” reality – with more embodied detail – or to create a more dramatised picture of the continuities between the themes from the past to the present – or maybe to strip the form completely, lean into the conversation and just make this a radio play.