Theatre review: The Chronicles of Kalki

Concluding the Gate's patchy "Who Does She Think She Is?" season on women and identity is, for me, the most interesting of the imported American shows we've seen get their UK premieres here. Alex Brown directs a breathless production of Aditi Brennan Kapil's play The Chronicles of Kalki, which sees a pair of teenage girls find empowerment with the help of a friend who may or may not be the living embodiment of a god. Kalki (Amrita Acharia) is the new girl in school, arriving halfway through an RE class about the avatars of Hindu gods. She befriends two girls whom she nicknames Meat (Angela Terence) and Betty (Jordan Loughran.) Never the most popular girls in school, they've even turned on each other recently, each thinking the other is holding her popularity back. Betty wants to be accepted by the resident gang of mean girls, the C-Cups, while Meat just wants the boys to notice her.

Theatre review: The Edge of Our Bodies

The Gate has recently played host to a number of memorable monologues, and although Adam Rapp's The Edge of Our Bodies features, for a few moments, a second character¹, in practice it's another one-woman show. Shannon Tarbet plays Bernadette, who's 16, pregnant, and has run away from her Connecticut boarding school to visit her boyfriend in New York. But before she gets a chance to break the news it becomes obvious he's trying to avoid her. Instead, Bernadette spends some time with her boyfriend's dying father, before an ill-advised encounter in a bar, as she resolves to decide on her own what to do about her situation. The Edge of Our Bodies is the first in a new season focusing on female identity entitled "Who Does She Think She Is?" and the journey of a teenage girl is an obvious fit to this theme.

Theatre review: Home

Director Nadia Fall has put together a verbatim play for The Shed, in one of the temporary venue's most successful productions so far. Home is set at Target East, an East London hostel for young people with a pretty bad reputation locally. Through interviews with the people who live and work in a real hostel, Fall attempts not only to highlight it as a place that does important, undervalued work, but also to expose its residents, no matter what their backgrounds, as more than just the uniform mass of feral youth the media portrayed them as around the time of the 2011 riots. Most of the people living in the hostel had been homeless prior to getting their place there; many had fled abusive homes, or been disowned and thrown out by their families, or had brushes with the law, even spent time in prison.