Review

aftercare preview

Posted by on Sep 20, 2012 in Review | 0 comments

Teri-Anne Teo on Remote Goat Steve Lambert’s new play, Aftercare examines the tentacled nature of sex and its unforgiving grip on three lives. The play begins with Paul (Daniel Howard) and Sam (Vanessa Russell), who are involved in a sadomasochistic relationship. Despite Paul’s dominant sexual role, he appears accommodating, rather than authoritative, in his delivery. His unlikely and almost, uncertain, sexual role is explained as it is revealed that he is used to being a submissive partner in his relationship with Lisa (Claire...

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Optik at Tacheles

Posted by on Oct 19, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

OPTIK AT TACHELES This article first appeared in Total Theatre Tacheles is no ordinary theatre. The outside of the building looks as though it is falling to bits. It is huge, made up of at least three blocks in one of Berlin’s main streets, with rusting ghost-like reminders of its origins as a department store and cinema.  In real estate terms I imagine it is worth millions.  But although it is surrounded by the cranes and concrete of Berlin’s current building frenzy it appears to be safe.  It is famous.  Tacheles is now on the tourist...

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The Man Himself

Posted by on Sep 29, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

Nicholas Butler Essex County Standard   The Man Himself by Alan Drury Essex University Theatre Alone on the stage sat a youngish nondescript man who chain smoked and told us, as it might be to the psychiatrist, that he ought to have been seeing, about his life, his condition and prospects. His name was Michael and he was apparently very concerned about the lack of moral standards in the world. ‘There is right. There is wrong. There are standards. They must be maintained,’ he said wretchedly. What he meant was that in order to save...

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One Spectacle Review

Posted by on Sep 28, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

MALCOLM HAY TIME OUT. February 1982 Optik are an exciting young company working in that area of performance art where the subtle interplay of actions, images and sounds can tease or fire the imagination but will provoke different responses and associations in each spectator. For me the richest and most startling vein of imagery plays upon contrasts and points of conflict between East and West: extremely funny sequences of stylised sexual attraction and rejection between performers in evening dress exist in ironic counterpoint with an Oriental...

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Short Tour Review

Posted by on Sep 28, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

Optik Radiator, Manchester   Into a landscape of bulbous white sculpture, mostly phallic, or reminiscent of the orifices down which people disappear in Bosch paintings, marches a Victorian lady with notebook in one hand and brolly in the other. Miss Amelia Edwards (Sally Gulley) is fastidiously documenting the ruins of Egypt, resolutely keeping pace with the flow of objects brought before her by a grinning, splay-footed Egyptian guide (Heather Ackroyd) who proffers boat tours and shouts ‘Panoramic views!’ at appropriate...

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Apple Theatre

Posted by on Sep 27, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

Peter Avis on Apple Theatre Morning Star May 1969   Apple Theatre, under the aegis of the Beatles’ organisation, is creating some of the most exciting experimental theatre of today. Recently, in the Brighton Combination theatre space, the company presented ‘Apart’, a performance around apartheid in South Africa. There were no costumes, no décor apart from that created by the lighting. But through the dramatic employment of documentary material, police interrogations, banning orders, the pass laws, the company brought the insidious...

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Ritual Theatre

Posted by on Sep 27, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

TIME OUT John Ashford Ritual Theatre: ritual could suggest a host of things, as Barry Edwards, the group’s director is the first to admit. From magic to actors leaping all over the audience. ‘Theatre’ suggests spoken words and a text. None of this – or even ‘meaning’ – has to do with the Ritual Theatre group. There are six performing members, three musicians and three actors. The musicians play bassoon, viola, flute and percussion, and have all come fo the group through bands (Comus, Henry Cow). The actors do not use words but...

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Winter Daddykins

Posted by on Sep 27, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

Howard Brenton’s Winter Daddykins Jack Tinker July 1968 Brighton Combination If ever the weapons in a woman’s armoury were remorselessly exposed, it is here in Howard Brenton’s brilliantly incisive piece of misogamy. This short, sharp arrow is fired not at a bull’s eye but a cow’s rump. For Mr Brenton is not re-fighting the conventional battle of the sexes, he is cataloguing the complete annihilation of the male species. Against the voracious femininity of his breed of female, the unfortunate male can put up only a token resistance,...

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Savage Amusement

Posted by on Sep 27, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

Raymond Meares The Stage Savage Amusement   Savage Amusement, a new play commissioned by the Faculty of Creative Arts from Peter Flannery with funding from a North West Arts New Writing Fellowship under the direction of Barry Edwards, is an outspoken work that blends humour and philosophy as it deals telling blows at the uncaring society which civilisation has thrown up. Among the serious issues in the play are squatting, the plight of the homeless and the unemployed, the problems of the inner cities. Set as it is in 1982 it would be a...

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Short Sighted

Posted by on Sep 27, 2011 in Review | 0 comments

STELLA HALL on Short Sighted at the Cockpit Theatre London PERFORMANCE MAGAZINE   Optik have already toured two shows, One Spectacle and Second Spectacle. Short Sighted was the first production I’d seen, and I certainly felt as though I’d been missing out on something, they’re the sort of company you fell you’d like to know from the start. There are images of extreme beauty and of sheer lunacy and sometimes they are the same. An eclectic assortment of instruments and Marjie Underwood’s electric singing combine to create a whole...

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