Cindy Marcolina - Page 30

Things haven't been easy for Dan after his split with his ex-wife Mandy. His best days now all have their daughter Maisie in them, and she's all he talks about. She's six and they're spending the day in London before she's due to go to her friend's birthday party. The unimaginable happens, and the cracks that were there become abysses. Roger Goldsmith's Maisie is the heart-wrenching account of a broken man.

The third offering of the newly opened Immersive LDN has become a festive classic over the years. Alexander Wright's adaptation of A Christmas Carol is known to appear at a different location every year; Scrooge's Parlour has relocated to the lower ground floor of the venue (which is also hosting their other talk of the town - The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street - whose faint noises you can hear in the distance if you pay enough attention).

Following last year's hyper-successful To Jesus, Thanks For Everything, BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon are back with their new extravaganza: All I Want For Christmas Is Attention. The show is a drag-tastic alternative Christmas treat.

Comedy trio Sleeping Trees bring Christmas to Battersea Arts Centre with their latest fairy-tale mash-up. After Cinderella and the Beanstalk and Scrooge and the Seven Dwarves, James Dunnell-Smith, Joshua George Smith, and John Woodburn venture into Wonderland in classic Sleeping Trees style. Goldilocks and the Three Musketeers is rambunctious and properly laugh-out-loud funny.

During a fortuitous meeting at the edge of an abyss, two strangers contemplate the existential decisions that have lead them there. A Bench at the Edge is a sharp and uncompromising dark comedy that examines mental health and free will. Luigi Jannuzzi's distinctively Beckettian piece of theatre delivers a broad observation on attachment to their existence and loss of hope, while directly addressing the individual complexities that push people to suicide. Directed by Kasia Różycki, the play is quiet and, even in the sparse auditorium of the Tristan Bates Theatre, offers a cinematic atmosphere to the story.

After being on Broadway twice, God has finally arrived to London. And She's a woman! A lesbian, specifically comedian Zoe Lyons. Displeased with how people have been taking Her Ten Commandments too literally, She's decided to descend onto Earth to give a new, updated, and more modern list first-hand so not to be misinterpreted once again. She's accompanied by Her two best Archangels, Michael (Matt Tedford) and Gabriel (Tom Bowen), who will help Her answer people's questions and set things straight for the future of the universe.

Magnificent Bastard Productions reveal the latest Christmas ace up their sleeve, presenting A Pissedmas Carol. In true Shit-faced Showtime fashion, they grab a beloved story and transform it into a jolly ol' drunken time by having a member of the cast highly inebriated before the curtain goes up.

Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso met in Paris in 1935. She was a young photographer who was establishing herself in a world dominated by men, and he was one of the most revered painters of the time. She was drawn to him for his artistic flair, he was known for chasing a new muse every other day.

Ronan Raftery plays chess world champion Boris Spassky in Ravens: Spassky vs Fischera??a??a??a??a??a??a??, beginning this week at Hampstead Theatre. The Cold War is taken to the chess board as Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer prepare for battle. Raftery told us what we should expect from this game of epic proportions.

After joining Jamie Lloyd in his Doctor Faustus at the Duke of York's Theatre and featuring in his Pinter at the Pinter season, Tom Edden is jumping back on stage with the director to star alongside James McAvoy in Cyrano. His credits name-check long-running shows like Les Misérables and Matilda, as well as plays of the likes of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Donmar and Amadeus at the National Theatre. We caught up with him to chat all things Cyrano and what makes Lloyd such a special director.

Tess' Christmas day has always been a bit different from other people's. Her mum is a doctor and her dad is a paramedic, so her family rarely manage to gather on the 25th of December to celebrate. This year - like every other - she's helping her grandmother and her uncle set up their big dinner while they all wait for her parents to come home from the hospital. To kill time as they finish off with the last touches, they swap their usual stories and share their christmas cheer.

When Anthony Neilson's Penetrator debuted in Edinburgh in 1993, it offered a grim reflection on the male psyche at the end of Thatcher's mandate. The Gulf War and the violence it brought for the boys who fought it made its way into the flat of two young men in their early 20s as their damaged old friend.

Vivian has just received her first Academy Award nomination. When an actress comes forward to accuse her 82-year-old actor father who's suffering from degenerative dementia of sexual assault, her career and personal life threaten to crumble. Her half-sister Margo, an influencer who's quite involved in the promotion of the #MeToo movement, becomes only the tip of the iceberg.

Sam (Pedro Leandro) arrives at Nick's (Edward Stone) for their date after they met online. Their rendez-vous is unlike many others: if all goes well, Nick is going to eat Sam. Stone and Leandro write a dark, twisted, and delicious play inspired by the Rotenburg Cannibal. Fiji accompanies their two characters while they spend their first and last weekend together, as they re-discuss their boundaries and what they expect from the meeting.

Sometimes theatre can go very wrong for a lot of reasons. The audience are required to take a leap of faith, suspend their belief, and put their trust in the performers on stage. Some shows require a lot from the people who watch them, some don't. Land Without Dreams demands a level of openness that it's never able to fulfill. The piece works well on paper. On stage, not so much. Besides making a bunch of promises that aren't kept, the piece is, regrettably, inconclusive and inconsequential.

Back in May 2015, news broke that the Turkish State Intelligence were shipping weapons to Syria. Can Dündar was the editor-in-chief who decided to take a risk and publish the story, he was arrested in November on the grounds of espionage and being members of a terror organisation. His unlawful imprisonment kick-started an intellectual resistance movement and garnered him worldwide support.

Alexander Wright has just moved his immersive version of The Great Gatsby into the newly refurbished Immersive LDN in Mayfair. We got a chance to ask him what makes a great immersive show, how to take care of the wellbeing of the audience, and the fascination the surrounds the jazz age.

Diana Son's play Stop Kiss debuted Off-Broadway in 1998. The jarring tale of a horrific homophobic crime feels as relevant as ever, as it was only this past July that a lesbian couple was violently attacked on a night bus in London. Callie and Sarah meet and unexpectedly fall in love. Instead of being as cute and fumbling as it should always be, their first kiss triggered an assault that will change their lives forever.

It's January 1979 and Britain is getting closer to the brink of collapse. It's time for some of the most trusted government advisers to gather together and take the reins of the nation to try to save it from itself. Parabolic Theatre take their audiences back to a moment that's far too similar to today to leave them unscathed. With the economy about to crash, the unions threatening to strike one after the other, and civil unrest steadily climbing to dangerous heights, the future of politics is in the hands of the public - and Parabolic make sure that it feels real from start to finish.

The final installment of the Royal Shakespeare Company's season in London sees Artistic Director Gregory Doran's Measure for Measure coming into town. The choice of play is momentous, as it's historically the Bard's only active denunciation of men's unfair treatment of women. Doran sets the piece in a turn-of-the-Century Vienna that's torn between the lasciviousness of its brothels and strict ideals of conservative purity.