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High anxiety: Collapse - Riverside Studios

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It’s a brave or maybe slightly provocative production to use Hammersmith Bridge on their artwork for a show called Collapse, which is about how everything collapses—poorly maintained bridges, relationships, and jobs. Nothing works. That’s probably too close to home for Hammersmith residents stuck with a magnificently listed and useless bridge on their front door. It gets even weirder when you realise the piece is staged in what looks like a meeting room with a bar. However, keeping things together in the most unlikely of circumstances is at the heart of Allison Moore's witty and engaging four-hander, which is currently having a limited engagement at Riverside Studios . The piece opens with Hannah (Emma Haines) about to get an injection from her husband (Keenan Heinzelmann). They’re struggling for a baby, and he’s struggling to get out of bed. But he managed to give her a shot of hormones before she started worrying about the rest of the day. She’s unsure she will keep her job with ...

Last chance: Fleabag @sohotheatre

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag has had a return run at the Soho Theatre for the past few weeks. It is a raw uncompromising monologue about a young woman uncertain about her place in life and wondering whether being sex obsessed and masturbating late at night to pornography on the internet is all it is cracked up to be.

A hit at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, and a success at the Soho Theatre last September, this time around the production seems a bit slicker, and Waller-Bridge's performance has evolved to become a bit looser making the most of the comic and tragic potential of the material. It's in the main theatre this time however so it misses some of the intimacy from a smaller space. But it still delivers an emotional impact tackling subject matter that you don't normally see discussed amongst friends, let alone put up on stage.

Fleabag concludes today at 5pm at the Soho Theatre. If you missed it this time, hopefully it will be back again in the future. If Waller-Bridge isn't free, I would settle for a series of special guest Fleabags...





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