Reviews

What do you do when forced to remain in lockdown over the past year or so? Create a world premiere online one-woman comedy of course. Performer and writer Maggie McCormack created F*CKING ANCIENT, inspired by her very personal exploration of the age we live in and our obsession with youth culture – which the pandemic forcing us to spend endless hours online has only served to reinforce – as Maggie says: "Being on Zoom and working from home, and looking at ourselves on screen all day!"

Mark St. Germain is a prolific American writer of plays, musicals, and documentary films. All of them are much acclaimed, many of them involve famous people. His play Becoming Dr Ruth  tells the story Dr Ruth Westheimer, who escaped from Nazi Germany in the Kinderstransport, went on to Israel and America, and eventually became a pioneering radio and television sex therapist.

There’s a bare room, with a table and a few chairs. A man sits reading a file, drinking his coffee. A white board has the letters ‘AJP’ written on it, and through one of the two doors, another man peers through, looking nervous. ‘Liam?’ asks the man with a file, and he nods in agreement.

Returning to the Playhouse after two COVID-jammed, performance-free years comes this tight production of Shakespeare’s most famous play. A packed, masked audience showed its standing approval of a three-hour performance featuring ghosts, multiple murders and betrayals, not to mention some of the greatest lines, scenes and soliloquies ever written.