Posts

Showing posts with the label samantha coughlan

Featured Post

High anxiety: Collapse - Riverside Studios

Image
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 ...
Read more...

Privileges and power: White Guy On The Bus @Finborough

Image
It’s always grim in Philadelphia in White Guy On The Bus. It’s a sharp, insightful and unsettling piece to remind us that race, power and inequality loom large over everything that happens in America. Or even here. It’s currently playing at the Finborough Theatre . It opens with what appears at first to be a series of lectures among two white couples about unconscious bias and latent racism. They’re on the lawn of a lovely house in Philadelphia. It seemed as topical as the aftermath of a recent Quentin Letts review . But that’s just a starter to what writer Bruce Graham really wants to tackle. The piece zeroes in on the divide in Philadelphia between low income blacks and the well-off white communities. The two remain separate and unequal. Philadelphia may be edgier than other parts of America, but it’s a story that applies anywhere. London too given the growing incidence of gang violence.   The play focuses around Ray (Donald Sage Mackay - in his London Theatrical debut). He works...
Read more...

Life goes on: Footprints On The Moon @Finborough

Image
  There's no place like home. Except when everyone around you wants to leave you and someone has scrawled your phone number on a wall of a dodgy bar. These are all important revelations in Footprints On The Moon. Canadian playwright Maureen Hunter's story of life in a small town is having its European premiere at the Finborough Theatre .  With its well-defined characters it's a fascinating insight into small-town Canadian life. It opens with Joanie ( Anne Adams ) sweating in a dress waiting at the station for her daughter to arrive back home. But even after writing a prize-winning essay about how fabulous life is in her small town things aren't quite what they seem. What becomes clear is that Joanie doesn't want anything to change and as her daughter grows up and wants to leave her world starts to fall apart. I Sharing the abstract set with Jam (with is running alongside this production) makes the audience have to work hard to believe that we're ...
Read more...