By Arik Levy Can the things we try to leave behind ever truly stop following us? In Levi Holloway’s stage adaptation of the Paranormal Activity films, directed by Felix Barrett, an American couple’s attempt to escape their past takes a terrifying turn. Currently playing at the Ambassador’s Theatre in London and touring the UK and…

By Krishen Vaya Can we ever truly escape the weight of our past, or are we destined to pass its burdens on to those closest to us? In the Lyric Hammersmith’s new adaptation of August Wilson’s Fences, directed by Daniel Bailey, a family in 1950s Pittsburgh finds itself caught between the scars of racial injustice,…

James Graham’s ambitious new play brings economics, politics, and art together in a beautifully theatrical portrait of economist John Maynard Keynes. What makes a good life? It is the simple question that sits at the heart of Graham’s new play, The Standard of Living. Set against the upheaval of the early twentieth century, Graham asks…

At eighteen many of us believe that we can change the world. For Summer, the protagonist of Demi Wilson-Smith’s Cranes, political awakening arrives in the form of a protest. The year is 2010, she has just turned eighteen, and armed with a new camera, her best friend Sasha, and an idealistic belief that history is…

How do you translate Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to the stage when the vast majority of the novel unfolds inside its characters’ minds? This brilliant production, staged at Manchester’s HOME theatre, answers that daunting question by placing a single performer at the centre of an ever-shifting landscape of people, memories, and fractured relationships. Over the course of…

Mimi Thompson’s high-concept horror-comedy The Haunting returns to London this October to tell the story of a woman receiving blood-sealed orders from her own period. We sat down with the creator to discuss the real-world anxieties behind the play, the comedic genius of the pre-menstrual urge to slap someone, and how she uses hyperbolic horror…

By Krishen Vaya How much do we owe to the future? As anxieties about existential, man-made threats once again dominate the headlines, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children feels as relevant as ever. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the play strands three retired nuclear scientists in a cottage in the aftermath of a disaster, forcing buried secrets and…

What a joy to see amateur theatre at its best. Progress Theatre’s production of Cold Comfort Farm is a hoot from start to finish as a cast of 13 – some doubling up to play different roles – do Paul Doust’s adaptation of Stella Gibbons’s novel mighty proud. At the centre of the play is…

A family photograph can preserve a moment while concealing everything that came before it. In The Smile of Her, Christine Lahti opens with an image of apparent domestic bliss: a 1950s American family smiling for the camera. It is a photograph of a conventional, happy childhood. Yet beneath the smiling faces lies a much more…

You never really know what is happening in the basement of a Camden cafe at 9.30pm on a Friday… There is something inherently exciting about a Fringe show that refuses to explain itself. PHAB, the latest offering from AB Drama, throws its audience into a world where Kafkaesque family dramas, audience participation and even a…