Critique OCTOBER 2018 : ISSUE 89
Theatre
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oxfinder makes its West End debut, with a hearty run at Ambassador’s Theatre that sees it through to 5 January 2019. “On the face of it, giving Dawn King’s dystopian [play] its West End premiere in 2018 is a canny move,” writes Alex Wood for What’s On Stage. “Riddled with alternative facts, conspiracy theories and fake news, [it] sits right at home in the posttruth world we’re told we live in. The references to food shortages littered through the script don’t feel too many steps away from many current Brexitrelated headlines about stockpiling.” Asks Domenic Cavendish in The Guardian, “What’s a foxfinder? Under martial law, those who cross the authorities can be sent to ‘factories’, while a focus of the totalitarian state’s concern skulks, seldom seen, in the wild – the immediate culprit for any dip in agricultural output. Woe-betide any farmer suspected of allowing a fox to roam about unchecked - a dreaded ‘foxfinder’ will be sent along to investigate.” The play “Has an obvious topicality – touching on mass hysteria, the power of myth and the dangers of anyone thinking they’re infallible,” writes Henry Hitchings for Evening Standard. “But after an eerie first few minutes, and despite an atmospheric design, the production doesn’t achieve enough claustrophobia and tension... It risks feeling like a parable about the hazards of scapegoating.” I Hear You and Rejoice is “pure distilled 100 percent proof theatrical magic, conjured up by one man on one chair on an otherwise bare stage. The boundless power of words and storytelling to conjure worlds to involve and enchant an audience has rarely been so clearly demonstrated,” says Fiona Mountford at the Evening Standard. Writer/performer Mikel Murfi’s performance is at Irish Arts Center Off Broadway; “You can usually spot a truly great actor by the lack of window dressing he puts on his performance. Standing on a bare stage and clad in a simple outfit... Murfi hides behind nothing ...
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Iwan Rheon and Paul Nicholls in Foxfinder. Credit: Pamela Raith
Both funny and heartwarming, [his] plays will transport you across the Atlantic using just the propulsion of his engrossing stage presence,” writes Zachary Stewart for Theater Mania.”Imitative skills are essential in a place where storytelling, and the caricaturing of your fellow citizens, is what transforms a seemingly uneventful backwater into a soap opera of endless fascination. Gossip here magnifies the smallest details of daily life to the outsize proportions of legend,” opines Ben Brantley for The New York Times. “Vinay Patel’s ambitious play probes ideas of home, freedom and ageing, as well as the legacy of colonialism. It draws inspiration from the experiences of his grandparents, who had an arranged marriage and moved from Gujarat to Britain via Kenya,” writes Evening Standard’s Henry Hitchings of An Adventure, at Bush Theatre throughout October. “The result is a running time over three hours and a sense of luxuriating
in the more dreamlike moments. This can feel indulgent, yet the performances are finely detailed, and Patel combines a gift for creating complex characters with a piercing emotional intelligence.” Audiences might expect a play “that draws on the writer’s own family history to be rose-tinted or sentimental, but Patel mixes affection with cold-eyed realism about what this couple did next,” says Alice Saville for Time Out London. “This epic could probably be a little pacier without losing its elegiac, cinematic feel. But with the reliably wonderful Anjana Vasan playing the fiery, deeply principled woman at its heart, it’s tough to begrudge this play a minute.” Writes Verity Healy for Exeunt Magazine, “Occasionally the focus of the production is on argument at the expense of dramatic tension. But [it is] not shy of reminding us that we are watching theatre and that this play is itself a product of colonisation – and the trauma it has left behind.”
