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The opening scene of this one-hour play is designed to confuse the audience, beginning the arc that leads to discovering the one event that changed everything. In a sense, this kind of narrative is hard to shock audiences with. You start to feel that everything is building up to a single revelation, and once it is revealed there is not much else to do, unless the characters are radically changed by the event. In Jade City, this doesn’t seem to ...

As we walk into the theatre, set up like a dingy apartment, the lights yellow and humid, the three characters are sitting on the furniture, looking at their phones. Soph gets her sister, Dex, and brother, Sim, up, and they go to their grandmother’s funeral, where a religious figure of some sort reads a hilariously bad obituary. The siblings start to giggle and we straight away get into the extremes we will spend the next 90 minutes in: the cold ...

A clever and very entertaining dance through many layers of London life

The hierarchy between Othello (Peace Oseyenum) and the sneaky network of unfaithfuls beneath him/her (although the actors are female, the characters are still their original gender) is set up around the stairs, at the outset of the play, which wouldn’t be possible in a usual theatre. So, from the first moment, we feel the long, dark tunnel stretching out above and beneath us. This is a place of no escape, and as Othello descends the stairs, you get the feeling ...

A funny, prescient and revealing drama that cleverly spins a big tale

OVO Theatre’s Twelfth Night opens with Viola and Sebastian performing their dance double-act on a cruise ship. This scene sets up many of the themes and problems that continue throughout the show. These include raucous humour that’s like jazz hands tirelessly shaking for 95 minutes, with the plot being used as a means of taking a step towards the next laugh, the next spectacular event of debauchery. Also a lack of consistent focus; seemingly clever suggestions that subtly reveal some ...