Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

I remember when drama wasn’t something squeezed into an end-of-term production slot or a “practical enrichment” box on the timetable.  It was part of English, right there in the Key Stage 3 curriculum, alongside metaphors, Macbeth, and the Year 8 class jumping off the ends of their desks as Icarus tested his wings.  (Apologies to the Head whose office was below my classroom.)

The Faction’s The Talented Mr Ripley is currently in Brighton and touring across the UK in the coming weeks.  It’s definitely worth an evening of your time - slick, unsettling, and fiendishly clever theatre that lingers long after the lights go up.  I’ll be keeping an eye on whatever this company does next.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is uncomfortably relevant. An intelligent man - a scholar, no less - trades his soul for limitless knowledge and twenty-four years of supremacy. In our world, the Mephistophelean pact isn’t written in blood but coded in algorithms.

If you’ve been anywhere near a Drama teacher’s social media feed the last couple of days, you’ll know it’s not pretty.  Instagram stories and Facebook groups are awash with exhausted posts from teachers swapping horror stories of grades torn down by moderation, and wondering why they bother putting in hundreds of unpaid hours if the system’s going to kneecap them and their students anyway.

What do you get when you cross Beckett with pop culture’s most laid-back duo? Potentially, something powerful.

Theatre is meant to take risks - and a production so joyous and kinetic is a gift.  It’s smart, messy, generous, and completely alive.  It’s Midsummer. It’s Madness.  It’s exactly the kind of anarchic disruption Shakespeare deserves.

There’s a particular magic that happens when you sit down in a theatre real, velveteen-seated, actual air-in-the-room theatre - and the lights go down.