The Cock Falls, May It Rise Again

Africker in Hoxton and One-on-One in Battersea

There’s a classic clown exercise known as “The Chicken in the Oven”, or sometimes called “Ladies and Gentleman: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette”. The clowns tumble over each other to present the finest performance ever of the great Bard’s masterpiece- but they have never seen the play, so they desperately fake it. Meanwhile, somewhere, a chicken is roasting to a blackened crisp and they keep popping off and on to keep an eye on it, probably watching it burn, because they’ve never cooked a chicken before either. Frankly, they haven’t a clue, but the last thing they want is for you to suspect anything is wrong.

April Theatre microreviews

Africker

Winterlong, Shunt: From grim to grin

A pregnant, teenage girl sits by a canal having a smoke somewhere in the fairytale land of the north. Manchester? Near Liverpool? She has a strange encounter with a filthy, feral, manic, half-naked child-of-the-street, whose only possession are a pair of red wellies.

Live Weekends: Shunt

Exit, Stag Left

Seduction and King Lear

At the turn of the 20th century in Austria, Arthur Schnitzler wrote Le Ronde, to be circulated only amongst friends but which was eventually produced. Schnitzler escaped prosecution for obscenity when the judge threw the case out.

He disowned the play, but it has since been staged many times since, reworked to best unsettle the current society. Jack Heifner has translated the play seamlessly for the gay scene and renamed it Seduction. The scenes are arranged in a circular fashion, handing off from rent boy to sailor to handyman to student, and finally to the Hollywood movie producer, who brings it back to the lowest rung on the social ladder, the rent boy.

The Velvet and Lace Revolution

Second Fnarr the the Right