Lyn's Picks: 29 Mar

Open Mic

The theatremaker behind the brilliant Bullet Catch returns with an interactive online show (available through Soho Theatre’s website) which poses the question: 'Do you remember the last really fun night out before the pandemic hit?' Directed by English Touring Theatre’s Richard Twyman, the show invites the audience to share their stories and secrets from the last year in a show that will be delivered live from Soho’s downstairs cabaret bar. Now, it may not sound like much but Drummond is an ingenious and always surprising theatremaker, and one who is often a bit of a magician in the way he incorporates the audience in his shows so that they become collaborators in the making of it. So, I’d say, well worth the risk.

Hysterical! The Hilarious History of Hysteria

Freud thought women suffered from it. The Victorians called it 'the vapours'. The Greeks thought it was caused by a wandering womb. In this new film, written and performed by Rebecca Buckle, and available via the Theatre Royal Stratford East website, the history of hysteria is uncovered in a comedy-lecture by a woman who is unafraid to label herself 'hysterical'. Mina Barber directs a show that charts thousands of years and takes us from Plato to the witch trials, as Buckle investigates a label that has been stuck on women for over 2,000 years.

The House of Bernarda Alba

There’s a final chance this week to catch Graeae’s fine 2017 revival of Lorca’s last great play completed shortly before his arrest and murder by Franco’s fascists in 1936. A co-production with Manchester’s Royal Exchange, the marvellous Kathryn Hunter plays the widowed matriarch Bernarda Alba who has locked her five daughters up in their Andalusian home and rules them with an iron will. An integrated cast of Deaf and disabled actors work brilliantly together in a production in which British sign language is used to add layers of meaning to Lorca’s text with its themes of power, punishment, thwarted desire and intimacy. Jo Clifford’s version is keen to the original’s political metaphor about repression and small acts of rebellion that take on greater significance.

You can find lots of streaming theatre shows - many of them available for free - in our Streamdoor guide

Cover image from Graeae's House Of Bernarda Alba.