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Showing posts with the label Ammar Duffus

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The brown word: Death on the Throne @gatehouselondon

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Weā€™re warned at the start of the show with an upbeat number that this is not the usual sort of musical. And it turns out to be just that. But with boundless enthusiasm and energy from its two leads, who deploy a range of voices and breathtaking energy to create a series of voices for puppet characters, a bedtime story becomes a silly oddball tale about four souls stuck in purgatory. With puppets. And various toilet humour references. Itā€™s currently playing at Upstairs At The Gatehouse . The piece starts as a bedtime story. Daddy (Mark Underwood) is about to read a bedtime story for Louise (Sarah Louise Hughes). But her stomach felt funny, and soon, she went to the bathroom. Then, for reasons that seem to only make sense in the confines of the show, they start telling the story of four people who died in unfortunate circumstances in the bathroom. Depicted as puppets, theyā€™re stuck in purgatory as St Peter doesnā€™t have enough space for each of them in the afterlife. And so begins a puppe...

Copy that: Dolphins and Sharks @Finborough

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At the end of the piece one of the characters asks the rest of them ā€œSo weā€™re just going to sit back and accept this?ā€ Before turning to the audience and asking the same question. This is a key question in Dolphins and Sharks, a firey and sassy take on the world of work, dead end jobs, race and power. Written by James Anthony Tyler itā€™s having its European Premiere at the Finborough Theatre . The story is set in rapidly gentrifying Harlem, where non-white people canā€™t get a break. But the argument about just going to sit back and accept this might ring true to many of the residents of Kensington and Chelsea, where the Finborough is based. Afterall this is the borough that has continued to convulse over the horror from the Grenfell Tower disaster in June. A disaster that feels like the culmination of negligence, a gulf between rich and poor and general disinterest.