Theatre review: The Tempest(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Shakespeare's Globe's winter season is one they can't really make a profit out of due to the Swanamaker's size, so traditionally it's been the one where less obviously commercial choices are made. In the past this has tended to mean expanding the repertoire to less famous Jacobean playwrights and beyond, but for the 2025/26 season it involves two of the more popular Shakespeare plays getting eccentric reinventions. And unlike Holly Race Roughan's Midsummer Night's Dream, which simply took the common trope of finding the play's dark side to its natural extreme, Tim Crouch's look at The Tempest is grounded in ideas I've seen applied to the play a lot less frequently. It is very recognisably Crouch's work, even without the fact that he also appears in it, because in a theme that runs through a number of his plays it takes place in a theatre - specifically this one.

Theatre review: I, Malvolio

One of a series of Tim Crouch monologues for Shakespearean supporting characters, I, Malvolio is the first of them to come to the Swanamaker, and the first one I've seen. Malvolio is the puritanical steward in Twelfth Night, who's tricked into believing his mistress loves him, humiliates himself for her, and is imprisoned as a madman for it. It's an uncomfortably dark subplot of an otherwise popular comedy, and that's the aspect Crouch focuses on as he brings Malvolio back on stage after the play's end, muttering and ranting to himself, quite possibly having been driven mad for real. In a show that's half play half stand-up routine, he starts on time, all the better to berate latecomers, or anyone who's given themselves a seat upgrade or left their phone on. But he's also brought a noose with him, and wants audience participation to help him use it.

Theatre review: Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation

Two years before the performance in the Royal Court Upstairs, Miles' son fell through the ice on a lake and drowned. Miles tried to save him but failed, and although he survived he ended up in a coma. In the present day, he regains consciousness, waking from dreams of the end of the world which he believes are premonitions; others believe him too, and follow him to the cult he sets up in a remote part of Bolivia. Fifteen years from now, the solar eclipse that portends the apocalypse is finally due, and Miles' estranged wife Anna (Susan Vidler) has flown out in a last-ditch attempt to get their daughter Sol (Shyvonne Ahmmad) away from his clutches. As with most plays, Sol's words and actions are pre-determined by the playwright's script. But the playwright in question is Tim Crouch, an experimental theatre-maker who regularly plays with the idea of how stories are told and who's in control of them, so Sol the character actually has a copy of the script in her hand.

Theatre review: The Complete Deaths

Just in case you haven't been paying attention - not just to this blog but to anything even remotely theatre-related - 2016 marks 400 years since the death of Shakespeare, and many companies (not the National) have been marking the occasion. They've mostly been doing this by staging his plays, which to be honest they do all the time anyway so it's not been altogether noticeable. Physical comedy troupe Spymonkey, though, have come up with a more fitting tribute to a morbid occasion with The Complete Deaths, which runs through the 65 deaths Shakespeare wrote (there's more than that in the canon, but for the purposes of this show only onstage deaths count) in a single evening. The framework is the classic comedy device of a company not quite on the same page, as Toby Park opens the show by announcing that after 18 years of silliness Spymonkey really need to go in a new, more serious direction and use these fictional deaths to explore dark realities.

Theatre review: An Oak Tree

"Do you think it's a bit contrived?" asks one of many knowing references in Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree, which is getting a 10th anniversary revival in The Artist Formerly Known As Shed. It's a piece performed by Crouch himself, playing a stage hypnotist who, a few months back, accidentally ran over and killed a young girl. Performing to a drunken crowd above a pub, he doesn't realise at first that the audience member who's volunteered to be hypnotised tonight is the dead girl's father. He's not there for revenge or confrontation; instead, seeing what his child's killer did for a living, he thought it might be a way of dealing with his own pain. The twist in the show's staging is that while Crouch always plays the hypnotist, the role of the father is played by a different actor every night - tonight it was Maggie Service.

Theatre review: Adler & Gibb

Artworks and their perceived value tend to be viewed in the light of the artist's life and personality. A certain brand of "method" acting on the other hand claims to put the real personality by the wayside entirely, immersing the actor in their character. Both ideas are present, bringing with them a kind of artistic temperament that edges into the unhinged, in Tim Crouch's Adler & Gibb. In 2004, a year after the mysterious death of modern artist Janet Adler, a student (Rachel Redford) attempts to secure a scholarship to art school with a lecture about Adler and her partner Margaret Gibb. She has a personal reason for her fascination with the pair, but it seems the interviewing panel don't share her enthusiasm.

Theatre review: Surprise Theatre - Cakes and Finance

"The writers have the keys" says the slogan for the summer season at the Royal Court, where Vicky Featherstone gives herself some lead-in time to her first season by asking several dozen playwrights to programme a festival of new writing. Judging by their first offering, when Featherstone gets the keys back she'll have a lot of cleaning up to do - if this is how masturbatory things are going to be, the cushions are going to get very sticky.

As part of the Open Court festival we have Surprise Theatre, in which a different short piece is performed every Monday and Tuesday night for two performances only (7:30pm and 9pm.) Title, subject matter, writer and cast are all a secret until the moment the curtains that have been installed in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs pull back and the show starts.