Tag Archives: York Theatre Royal

Same Same Different: a sense of belonging for the trans-racial adoptee

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Writer Naomi Sumner Chan’s new verbatim play Same Same Different diverts from the widely-told adoption fairy tale that follows parents through the process of trying to adopt, where adoption as the happy endgame. Here she examines what happens after the happy ending, the “tainted golden ticket”; how adoptive families sculpt themselves and their unit, and what residual questions remain for – particularly trans-racial – adoptees. Continue reading →

The Cult of K*nzo: One of a kind

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Directed by Martin Bengtsson and billed as a playful critique of consumer culture through the lens of high fashion, Cult of K*nzo is a riotous, colourful indulgence of enabled, regressive fandom, from the fantasies to the grandeur to the raucous, unadulterated sense of humour of childhood. Writer-performer, multimedia artist Paula Varjack, has the energy of an enthusiastic eight-year-old, her passion for fashion driving her through poignant, peaceful narratives on the history of her icon to deadpan mockery of catwalk dressage folly, to delightfully cutting narration of television ads. Continue reading →

The Audit (or Iceland, a modern myth): They f***ing knew

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Multi-disciplinary company Proto-type bring a new research-based work to York Theatre Royal’s Studio; the second show produced under this title, though the collective comprises evidently seasoned practitioners who really know their business. Continue reading →

Handbagged: The Queen and the Iron Lady head-to-head

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You know it’s a good play when you almost forget that you’re meant to be taking notes. And Handbagged is a very good play. By imagining what might have happened in the weekly meetings between the Queen and the Iron Lady, Moira Buffini has created a play that is engaging, funny, and best of all, great fun to watch. Continue reading →

The Trick: Speaking to Angels

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We do not always want to exorcise our ghosts. Not all our ghosts frighten us. Some ghosts are our angels, our protectors, too much of a comfort for us to let them go. In this, too, lies their frightening potential. This is the quiet tragedy of Mira (Lachele Carl), the elderly protagonist of Eve Leigh’s play The Trick. Continue reading →

Rotterdam: love lost and found

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Jon Brittain’s Olivier Award winning Rotterdam is a tidily-packaged, light-hearted play that confronts the messy, fraught discourse of identity and its uncomfortable polygamous marriage to gender, sexuality and labels. Neatly designed and sensitively researched, its humanity sings through its excellent cast and softening Sappho-pop soundtrack. Continue reading →

Tensile Strength (or How To Survive at Your Wit’s End): thoughtful, healing theatre

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The audience shuffles into a room filled with empty buckets; writer-performer Holly Gallagher sitting behind a small desk with a stack of paper in front of her. She begins by introducing the idea of the level of stress one person can withstand as a bucket, and the causes of stress as water. Some of our buckets are large, some are small, some are full, some are empty. Continue reading →

Heart of Darkness: interrogating the canon

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imitating the dog present a deconstructed retelling of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel about colonial tensions in turn-of-the-century Europe and Africa; a Lynchian reach into our collective psyche that challenges what we are obliged to keep or discard when engaging with our cultural canon. A pertinent study for our time of rising nostalgia for imperialism. Continue reading →

Noughts & Crosses: racism revisited

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Malorie Blackman’s widely taught and celebrated is brought to the stage by a plethora of theatre companies; York Theatre Royal, Pilot Theatre, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Derby Theatre and Mercury Theatre Colchester co-produce this evocative theatrical adaptation by Sabrina Mahfouz, directed by Esther Richardson. Continue reading →

Lost In A Sea of Glass and Tin: Lynchian dissonance

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Lost in A Sea of Glass and Tin is an intermedial performance devised by creative duo Gary and Claire, aka Gary Winters and Claire Hind, during a residency at Chicago Defibrillator Gallery and performed as part of York Literature Festival at York Theatre Royal Studio. Utterly incomprehensible, yet ultimately endearing, the show is inspired by David Lynch’s unsettling and noireesque imagination and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Continue reading →