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Life upon the wicked stage: Already Perfect at Kings Head Theatre

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Performing two shows a day on a Broadway run sounds exhausting enough. But when you’ve just had a not-so-great matinee and are having a crisis of confidence, I would assume the last thing you’d want is to confront your past. Yet that’s the situation in Already Perfect, writer-performer Levi Kreis’s slightly autobiographical journey of confronting the past and his younger self. With a series of toe-tapping and emotional songs in a sleek production, you’re invited to experience someone else’s therapy session. And with a show title called Already Perfect, you know what kind of session this is going to be. It makes for a show where nothing is left unsaid, even if it is unnecessary,  unbelievable or best left on a greeting card. It’s currently playing at the King’s Head Theatre .  The story begins in his dressing room after a matinee, with Kreis alone. The show didn’t go so well. Struggling after being dumped by a lover, pressure mounting on the evening show being filmed for poster...

When women war: The Lonely Soldier Monologues @cockpittheatre @LSpace10

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The Lonely Soldier Monologues , currently playing at the Cockpit Theatre, by Helen Benedict takes the stories of seven women who served in the US Armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. What emerges from this verbatim play is the subtle and none-too subtle methods of discrimination and sexual harassment that they suffer serving in the armed forces. The piece is not anti-war or anti-military; for many of these women the serving in the Armed services was a way to show patriotic duty after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or just a way off welfare. But it highlights many of the excesses known from the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, in war so poorly planned and organised that soldiers had to make do without body armour but could still eat lobster.