REVIEW: Right Now, Bush Theatre ✭✭✭✭
A Freudian wet dream, the characters drink, dance and dare each other on further with party games and peculiar eroticism.
A Freudian wet dream, the characters drink, dance and dare each other on further with party games and peculiar eroticism.
From March 2016, as part of artistic director Madani Younis’ aim of creating a theatre that truly reflects the community, the Bush Theatre will undergo a major redevelopment. There are plans to create a second performance space, improve backstage facilities and build a new front-of-house area, as well as making the building fully accessible and more sustainable. During the building works, the Bush Theatre’s programme will move out into the local community, embracing the buildings and people of West London. Shows will include: the European premiere of Boys Will Be Boys, about representations of women in the male-dominated world of the city; This Place We Know, the first co-production between the Bush Theatre and Headlong; The Neighbourhood Project, a community project in collaboration with Look Left Look Right and featuring residents of Shepherd’s Bush; and a revival of The Royale, based on the story of the first African-American heavyweight champion … Read more
Nothing much that happens is surprising or even that interesting, except that this is an entirely black Church family. And, in that one way, it sparkles with a freshness, an intriguing quality which commands attention.
There is a great deal to like in this production. Payne’s writing is intriguing and the pace never really flags. It is a good play, just not a brilliant one.
As you enter the auditorium through the rehearsal room, you can almost smell the unwashed theatre students who have earnestly, yet slightly rabidly, put together this piece of protest performance art.
It is difficult to believe that anyone would programme this play and even more difficult to believe that there are not better plays which deserve productions decades before this one.
This is a wonderful night at the theatre, exhilarating and rewarding, and a portentous debut for Kinnear. It is a play which could play anywhere – and should. It has insightful and glorious things to say about love, parenting and family – and it is fiendishly funny to boot.