James Acaster: Hecklers Welcome Why does one of the finest standups now working have such vexed feelings about standup? In Hecklers Welcome, Acaster returned to the roots of his performing life, excavating tale after humiliating tale to explain his neurotic relationship with the stage – and letting hecklers have their say, too. The result? One of the freshest and funniest shows of the year, a frenetic, neurotic and time-bending character comedy. Jane Austen, the Brontës, Downton Abbey – Rosalie Minnitt’s Clementine takes a bit of all of them, bungs them in a blender with 21st-century femininity, then perches a frilly bonnet on top. Read the reviewįrenetic character comedy … Rosalie Minnitt. The Goole man’s Edinburgh fringe hour was a masterpiece of miffedness, as Smith’s efforts to de-stress after a breakup repeatedly hit the buffers. After Lee Evans came Rhod Gilbert, and next comes … Ian Smith? Perhaps. Ian Smith: Crushing Every generation needs its fall guy for the indignities and annoyances of modern life. Was it quite as funny as Berlant’s standup? Maybe not – but Kate was a must-see all the same. Kate Berlant Is Kate A twisty mock autobiography and self-sendup by one of the world’s wickedest comic talents, Kate Berlant’s show – a spoof on narratives of celebrity self-realisation – arrived in the UK in a blaze of hipster hype. A once in a lifetime experience for this critic, who stayed up for the full 24-hour cycle and was left astonished, elated and utterly shattered. Guest actors included Andrew Scott, Idris Elba, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Toby Jones but it was Wilson’s spellbinding performance that kept us wide-eyed. If that sounds repetitive, it was not only different each time but more captivating as the night – and following day – wore on. A single, unrehearsed scene was played out 100 times with various actors joining Wilson on stage. Ruth Wilson signed up to the herculean task of staying up for 24 hours to perform in Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s avant garde theatrical marathon at the Young Vic in London. Once in a lifetime … Ruth Wilson in The Second Woman. Both strands asked profound and moving questions about identity, illness and death. Directed by Helgard Haug, it brought together the very public disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in 2014, carrying 239 people, and the psychic “disappearance” of Haug’s elderly father into illness after his dementia diagnosis. They dug deep for this riveting production at Home for the Manchester international festival. German theatre company Rimini Protokoll spend years researching each show. Written with stark, minimalist poetry by Marc-Emmanuel Soriano and translated from French by Amanda Gann, it served as a compassionate antidote to the prevailing anti-immigration hysteria of our times. The Finborough’s devastating two-hander about a migrant marooned on the wrong side of a stretch of water, prevented from restarting his life after an unnamed trauma, was one of them. One Who Wants to Cross Some shows lodge in the mind and refuse to be forgotten. Conceived by Mojisola Adebayo, Roy Williams and Matthew Xia, this Greenwich + Docklands international festival production was filled with warmth, hope, sadness and joy, all accompanied by a lovably bossy bus conductor in Llewella Gideon. Photograph: David Levene/The GuardianĪ bus ride on the 30th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s murder took its audience through his neighbourhood in London, past the memorial raised in his name and the bus stop at which his racist killing took place. Sadness and joy … Dalumuzi Moyo and Omar Austin in The Architect. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead The aftermath of war and its trauma was captured through the lens of widows, daughters, queens and concubines, while its music, composed by K-pop producer Jung Jae-il and pansori master Ahn Sook-sun, was a magnificent blend of ancient and modern. Trojan Women This grand, operatic production by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea at the Edinburgh international festival explored the fall of Troy from the point of view of the women left behind – to scintillating effect. It turned out to be a blast of a show, with an imagination that had an integrity of its own and majestic stage spectacle so encompassing that it feels immersive. Stranger Things: The First Shadow This darkly glittering monster of a production in the West End, adapted by Kate Trefry from the retro sci-fi Netflix behemoth, might easily have been a cynically lucrative exercise in imitation. Out of this world … Louis McCartney, Calum Ross and Maisie Norma Seaton in Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
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