Robert Shaw

REVIEW: The Medium and The Wanton Sublime, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Off West End, Opera, Reviews
The Wanton Sublime presented as part of the Grimeborn Festival

And so to the culmination of the contemporary opera section of the Grimeborn Festival, a double-bill in the form of Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Medium and The Wanton Sublime, a new work by Tarik O’Regan, to a libretto by Anna Rabinowitz. Robert Shaw directed both operas and the Orpheus Sinfonia conducted by Andrew Griffiths accompanied the second half. The house was sold-out in anticipation of an evening of musicianship of high quality – an expectation that was by-and-large fulfilled.

REVIEW: Product, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭

Off West End, Reviews
Product at the Arcola Theatre

Directed by Robert Shaw, this fifty minute satirical monologue is well worth seeing for Olivia Poulet’s gifted comic turn. She extracts the humour rather as a surgeon lances a boil: with swift, sure, incisions that produce copious discharge, some of it unpleasant to think about. I doubt her delivery of the work could be bettered, so carefully thought through and executed is every aspect of her captivating performance.