Rosie Wood
Reviews | Opinion | Interviews
recent posts
about
Category: Uncategorized
-
Even in comedies, jokes are often treated as decoration rather than substance – meant to entertain while pointing to deeper themes. But the RSC’s new production of Twelfth Night, directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, doesn’t shy away from a focus on fun. Devoting more time to clowning and the comedic subplot – in which Olivia’s uncle Sir Toby Belch…
-
So many comedy plays rely on oddness as their engine, but this kind of humour is far harder to execute than it appears. Surreal jokes need to feel genuinely strange — surprising, even dark and a bit disturbing. When the oddness isn’t odd enough, or the darkness not quite dark enough, or the ideas not…
-
PRESSURE 3 brings together emerging theatre makers who are split into four teams, given the same theme, budget, and rehearsal time, and tasked with creating a half-hour play performed over three nights. Audiences vote each night, and a winner is announced at the end. The theme is “time is running out,” producing four pieces: Forwards or Backwards, Cookie…
-
Josh Jones returns with a new show, I Haven’t Won The Lottery So Here’s Another Tour Show, that plays like a round-the-houses tour of his life, told through a series of joke-embellished stories about his family, dyslexia, Dancing On Ice, his relationship, his hometown and “bumming,” among other things. The opening is clever: a bit about reading hate…
-
With his cap on and two earrings firmly in place, Carl Donnelly takes to the stage with Another Round, his latest hour of laid-back, anecdotal comedy. Last year, he tempted fate with a show about feeling good about going into middle age — and life promptly reminded him of its brutality. This time, he unpacks the fallout with his…
-
Karen is a new one-woman show by Sarah Cameron-West that follows in the tradition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda Hart: a protagonist, written and performed by Cameron-West herself, conjures an entire world as she attempts to navigate troubled relationships and the social demands of office life. The unnamed protagonist has broken up with by her boyfriend, Joe,…
-
Jeremy Nedd’s From Rock to Rock is a meditative and atmospheric piece that interrogates the theft of Black cultural expression through the story of the court case brought by rapper 2 Milly against the video game company behind Fortnite for appropriating his dance move, the Milly Rock. It serves as a poetic resistance against the commodification of Black creativity…
-
Walking away from a dream sounds like a nightmare—having to admit defeat to yourself, to everyone who knew about your ambitions, and to let go of something that’s become integral to your identity. In her one-woman show How to Give Up on Your Dreams, Meg Chizek loudly and proudly tells us how she gave up on…
-
Bloody Mary and the Nine Day Queen tells the tragic story of Lady Jane Grey (Anna Unwin), the 17-year-old cousin of Mary I (Cezarah Bonner). Following the death of the young King Edward VI, the so-called “puppet king,” England is left in need of a monarch. With both Mary and Elizabeth declared illegitimate, Edward’s advisor,…
-
Michael Rosen’s Getting Through It is a two-part show formed of two stories: The Death of Eddie and Many Kinds of Love. In the first of these, he takes us through the day his son Eddie died in 1999, the moments that followed, the funeral, life after the funeral, and the ongoing present. The second…
Rosie Wood 