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Life upon the wicked stage: Already Perfect at Kings Head Theatre

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Performing two shows a day on a Broadway run sounds exhausting enough. But when you’ve just had a not-so-great matinee and are having a crisis of confidence, I would assume the last thing you’d want is to confront your past. Yet that’s the situation in Already Perfect, writer-performer Levi Kreis’s slightly autobiographical journey of confronting the past and his younger self. With a series of toe-tapping and emotional songs in a sleek production, you’re invited to experience someone else’s therapy session. And with a show title called Already Perfect, you know what kind of session this is going to be. It makes for a show where nothing is left unsaid, even if it is unnecessary,  unbelievable or best left on a greeting card. It’s currently playing at the King’s Head Theatre .  The story begins in his dressing room after a matinee, with Kreis alone. The show didn’t go so well. Struggling after being dumped by a lover, pressure mounting on the evening show being filmed for poster...

A matter of laughs and death: Good Grief

Another week in lockdown passes. The chances of theatres reopening anytime soon still seem remote. And so experiments with the possibilities for theatrical streams continues with Good Grief. 

Theatre streams have been filmed plays, staged readings or even staged like a zoom meeting. Good Grief plays with the feeling of a staged production. Scene changes and props are moved around on camera and titles pop up on screen to set the scene. 

It opens at the end of a party. It looks like it's been a big night of drinking and going on. But it turns out that it was after a wake. In between sorting out the mess from the party Cat (Sian Clifford) and Adam (Nikesh Patel) stumble around the topic of losing someone they both loved to cancer.

The piece tracks Cat and Adam coming to terms with their loss, their feelings of guilt about leaving things not the way they had hoped. And they're trying to navigate the niceties and expected behaviours following a death in modern Britain. What's the best way to distribute the belongings of someone who has died? Should atheists have funerals in a church? Is pink underwear a sign of moving on?

Clifford and Patel create an intimate and funny portrayal of two people with a past. They're muddling through to find a way forward and move on. With or without shagging each other. There's also an honesty in the writing and performances that draw you into it. And of course, Clifford being of Fleabag fame, gives the piece a jolt of star power.

A piece about Grief and loss, even a funny one, may not be everyone's idea of a good time during a pandemic. But on the other hand, although so many people have died in the past year, it seems abstract. Here death and its impact on those around it is front and centre. 

Written and created by Lorien Haynes and directed by Natalie Abrahami, it is available to stream from 15 February on Original Theatre Online. It’s also worth checking the other productions available to stream on the site as well.

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