REVIEW: Carmen Disruption, Almeida Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Carmen Disruption at the Almeida Theatre

At just over 90 minutes, this is a theatrical spectacle and tapestry as ethereal and vital as it is strange and incomprehensible. Simon Stephens throws those elements such as the destruction of community, the isolation of individuals, the globalisation and sterilisation of culture, the power of money and capitalist dreams, the despair that comes from non-intervention, together with the characters and some of the music and plot points from Bizet’s Carmen, into a blender, creating a dystopian present-day landscape where pretty much anything can and does happen. The poetic nuances fly through the writing such that return visits to see the production again are almost compulsory.

REVIEW: The Cherry Orchard, Young Vic ✭✭✭✭

Young Vic present The Cherry Orchard

Set firmly in the present, this version lacks languid notions about the past, does not spend too much time on the intricacies of character and prefers shock and blatant slapstick to more gentle ways of making points. There is little sense of old versus new Russia, little sense of the changing of traditions and times and less complexity about everything. But it is radiantly bleak, full of brittle, awful people leading duplicitous and untruthful lives. In that way, it is a compelling re-imagining of Chekhov’s masterpiece.