Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise - Wound / Telescope / River / Eclipse / Performance

Back to Coronavirus, lockdown and isolation as seen through the uniquely, romantically twisted viewpoint of Philip Ridley, as I go back for a second selection of online premiere monologues in his The Beast Will Rise series (my review of the first four is here.) The next five feature both the longest and the shortest so far, and while most of them can be seen as having a specific significance to the circumstances under which they've debuted, they all could easily remain interesting taken out of context. Probably the least obviously tied to the theme of lockdown is Wound, in which Mirren Mack gives us a journey into a troubled mind in pain, escape into both self-harm and fantasy worlds, but also a resilience that keeps her coming back to reality. A few months into lockdown and everything being done on Zoom has become visually boring, but director Wiebke Green gives Wound  its own identity with a stark clinical whiteness and maintaining an extreme close-up on Mack's face that heightens the sense of anxiety.

Theatre review: Stalking the Bogeyman

My theatrical choices have been packed with irony this heatwave, as baking hot fringe theatres are having to pass for some cold locations - last night the Himalayas, tonight Alaska, where journalist David Holthouse's family moved in the late 1970s. Although they didn't know anyone in Anchorage to start with, Nancy (Glynis Barber) and Robert (Geoffrey Towers) quickly made friends with a local couple, whose teenage son was happy to babysit the younger David while their parents held dinner parties. In fact when he was seven, David (Gerard McCarthy) was raped by the then 17-year-old son, whose name he refuses to use, only calling him the Bogeyman (Mike Evans.) Written by Holthouse along with the show's director Markus Potter, Stalking the Bogeyman is a documentary play that does relive this childhood trauma, but centres more on the adult David's desire for revenge.