By Cal
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aTlHSECRcE&t=2s
With subtitles: https://www.scenesaver.co.uk/production/masks-and-faces-subtitled
Available until: Wednesday 25th August 2021
Masks are so much a part of our lives now, I mistakenly expected this to be a new play about current times. I was only about 170 years out of date. Masks and Faces is a Victorian farcical comedy, first performed in 1852.
By Cal
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGFDp_Pu-d8
Available until: 8th April
Content warning: The play contains strong language, and themes of violence, including sexual violence, and sexual abuse. 16+
Play Fight won the ETPEP prize in 2020. Every year, the Finborough Theatre runs a playwriting competition for people who have worked in the theatre industry for at least two years but have never worked as playwrights. If anyone wants to enter this year, they’ll need to hurry up because the deadline is 30th April.
By Cal
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AoIzgAHGoc
Link with subtitles: https://www.scenesaver.co.uk/production/s-27-subtitled
Available until: Unknown
Content warning: 15
S-27 is a play about pain and hurt. About people
who have been ripped away from their old lives and forced into a new one where
they can’t be themselves. They have to be someone else; someone stronger. And
that’s just the lucky ones. The ones who got to live.
By Cal
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROwZ8Ql6sZc
Link with subtitles: https://www.scenesaver.co.uk/production/i-wish-to-die-singing-subtitled/
Available until: 31 December 2020
Warning: 18+ Descriptions of violence, mutilation, sexual assault, murder,
race hatred
In many ways, this feels more like a documentary than a
play. There are positives and negatives which I’ll discuss later, but it led me
to wonder why there are so few documentary plays. There are obviously a lot of
documentaries on TV and a few documentary films, but plays seem to be almost
exclusively telling stories. Some are true stories, but all are presented as a
sort of fiction.
By Cal
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIFH_mlEJ0o
Link with subtitles: https://www.scenesaver.co.uk/production/adding-machine-a-musical-subtitled/
Available until:
Trigger warnings: Racism, Capital punishment, suicide
The Finborough Theatre has put on some brilliant productions
over the years and one thing I love about them is that they’re not afraid to
take risks.
But one downside of taking risks is that every so often, a
risk won’t pay off – and this production didn’t pay off for me. If you look on
google, there are numerous publications proclaiming it as a four-star musical
and they’re more likely to be right than me. But I’m not going to pretend I
liked and understood it when I didn’t.
By Cal
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgCzWFZ5wzE&t=7s
Link to subtitled version https://www.scenesaver.co.uk/production/blueprint-medea-subtitled/
Available until: 14th November 2020
Trigger warning: references to sexual violence. 18+
Blueprint Medea was the Finborough for Free release
for July and now it’s back. It’s a good play, but the sound quality isn’t that
great so if you might want to watch it with subtitles on Scenesaver. You’ll
need to register, but it won’t cost you anything.
I didn’t know the legend of Medea when I first
watched this play. Apparently, this is a story which everyone knows, but
‘everyone’ did not include me. Knowing the story would probably help. It is a
difficult play to follow anyway, switching back and forth between the past and
present, which some sections symbolised rather than acted out and others hinted
at rather than fully explained. Having an idea of what is happening does help
to make sense of some of these moments (it did make more sense to me the second
time I watched it). But it is still quite a complicated play and even people
who know the story have had trouble following it.
By Cal
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TsWYuikhwE
Available until: Unknown.
Until today, the only thing I knew about Ernest Hemingway
was that he’d written The Old Man and the Sea, a novella I’d really
struggled to make any sense of. I approached the play with some trepidation and
quickly discovered that I was ignorant to the extent that it was affecting my
understanding of the play. Hemingway was very vividly played by Edmund Dehn,
the sole performer, but the text lurched from one subject to another. The first
problem with this was that it left me feeling rather disorientated. The second
problem was that the one impression which I did get from Dehn’s performance was
that Hemingway was extremely confused and it was impossible for me to form any
idea of how much of his ramblings was real and how much came from his paranoia.
By Arran
Link to where the live stream will be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o8jvP5djME&feature=youtu.be
Link to where the subtitled version will be: https://www.scenesaver.co.uk/production/scrounger-subtitled/
Link to where the audio-described introduction will be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6A_W1u-fEg&feature=youtu.be
Available for: 24 hours from 31st August
I don’t usually write reviews, but I wanted to review Scrounger
because it is such a special and important play for people with disabilities.
It was available for three days at the start of August and it is being brought
back for 24 hours at the end.
This play is by Athena Stevens. She is a playwright and she
has a disability. This is a fictional play, but it is based on a real incident
she had at the airport. I am not sure how much is real and how much is fiction.
