Pigeon Reviews
A random pigeon’s low-to-no-context theatrical nitpicks.
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Review: The Last Man & With All My Fondest Love
The Main Takeaway: If one has a one-person show, one would be well-advised to hire someone who can act. Better still, one would be well-advised to hire someone who can write. The Last Man Tl; dr: With a different writer, director, composer, and actor, this might have been rather good… Read more
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Two Noble Kinsmen in Mansfield Principal’s Garden Reviewed by a Guest Pigeon
Star rating: N/A (The Guest Pigeon who writes in Baskerville opted out of the numerical grading system) In the hands of director Annabelle Higgins, Fletcher’s and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, reaches its tragicomic potential and provides welcome refreshment amongst the innumerable productions of A… Read more
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To What End: an English student’s commendable attempt at French absurdism
2.5-3/5 ‘I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this particular part of Oxfordshire, but the number of theatrical suicides that take place seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.’ I confess I have not… Read more
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The Estate: a Surgical Debut
5/5 To be entirely honest, I bought a ticket to this show on a whim. I was idly browsing the NT website after realising that the show I have been meaning to go to has sold out, and when I saw the word ‘scandal’ next to the figure ‘£20’, I… Read more
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The Final Salomé, “Il ne faut regarder que l’amour”
3-3.5/5 I must confess that Lily Zhang’s Final Salomé has had the misfortune of my intimate involvement – observation or interference, depending on the perspective – in its creative process. The reader should hence understand that while my review is enriched with my knowledge of the play and its context,… Read more
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Blood Wedding: Musicality Giveth, and Musicality Taketh Away
3.5/5 For most directors of symbolist plays, one of the first big creative decisions they have to make is perhaps how much realism they will imbue the piece with, since some realism is usually necessary to make the performance convincing, yet too much realism spoils the power of the writing.… Read more
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Patience: “Just like a good English Breakfast”
2.5/5 The Oxford Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s production of Patience was a very good rendering of the satirical opera of the aesthetes, which plays with Victorian sensibility towards mediocre poetry in a way that reminds me of Molière’s Précieuses Ridicules. Modulo prop mishaps like a shattered mirror (Bunthrone managed to… Read more
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