Close-Up Culture

By Genevieve Dammery 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…

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…

By Genevieve Dammery 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…

By Genevieve Dammery 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…

By Genevieve Dammery A notebook that kills people may not sound like musical theatre material, but Death Note: The Musical at the Barbican makes it work, and then some. Running for 50 performances only, this adaptation of one of the most successful Mangas ever published manages to satisfy devoted fans while remaining accessible and exciting…

Producer Martin Szalla joins us on Close-Up Culture to preview his show, PHAB, which will have its world premiere at Camden Fringe. What inspired you to bring together such a wide range of absurd, surreal and sometimes grotesque ideas in PHAB? It just happened because of the people: if a bunch of absurd, surreal and sometimes grotesque…