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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 ...

Repurposed: Owners @JSTheatre

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Caryl Churchill's Owners is an excellent example of how you can feel nostalgic for an unpleasant time in history. After all fifty years since its premiere, the property market has gone from bad to worse. And despite the seventies look and feel, it feels as if it still has something to say about property, ownership, and the transactional relationships that make up life in the country. Not to mention the relentless pursuit of Victorian terrace houses that most parts of the world wouldn't touch, it is currently playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre .  The revival brings out the oddities of the piece. The freewheeling sexual politics and the changing legal environment allowing property to be bought and sold with less regulation seem like they are from a different time and place. And they are. It's almost as if we need a history lesson to understand the time and place. The programme notes that market rates for tenancies were only allowed in 1989. Since then, we have been through ...

Giving a toss: East @KingsHeadThtr

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Dirty, smutty and just a little bit Shakespearean. East takes you back to the rough and tumble of the good ol’ days of London. A time when fascists roamed the streets, baked beans on toast was considered cuisine and street brawls were just for laughs. Some time between the 1950s and the 1970s in East End London. It’s playing at the Kings Head Theatre . But in the forty or so years since it premiered something seems amiss with this piece. It feels desperate to shock rather than the genuine article. Every c-bomb and mother-son jerk off seemed telegraphed in advance rather than something new, fresh and gross. Perhaps nothing surprises us anymore in the city where the horrors are real. Modern day enslavement, sexual harassment, acid attacks and the Grenfell disaster. A punch up in a bar and a wank in the cinema are cute by comparison. Still it’s energy is fascinating. If a tad exhausting to watch. A series of scenes and monologues explode in front of you before disappearing. Leaving you to...