The Donmar Warehouse’s latest Trafalgar Studios season, designed to showcase the work of new directors, begins this week with Aleksei Arbuzov’s The Promise, set in Leningrad in the midst of the Second World War, in a new version by Penelope Skinner (Fucked, The Village Bike); Alex Sims, whose past productions include Dov and Ali at Theatre503, directs.
The Bush Theatre Radar Festival continues with a platform on the 19th November entitled How is Critical Discourse Keeping Pace with Contemporary Theatre? Speakers include occasional Exeunt contributors Andrew Haydon and Selma Dimitrijevic alongside Maddy Costa and Sean Holmes. There’s also a panel on new writing featuring Caroline Horton on the 22nd November as well as a chance to see Kieran Hurley’s tender, pulsing solo show Beats as part of a double bill with Che Walker’s Lovesong.
Forced Entertainment’s The Coming Storm returns to the BAC, a show which according to Daniel B. Yates, “feels like a compilation of everything we have seen them do before, except this time with drums.” It can be seen alongside Tim Etchell’s latest work, Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First, a solo piece performed by Jim Fletcher who also featured in the extraordinary Gatz (for more on Forced Entertainment and Etchells, you can read Diana Damian’s insightful interview with Etchells here) and Clout Theatre’s absurdist work, How a Man Crumbled.
At the National Theatre, Timothy Sheader directs John Lithgow and Nancy Carroll in Arthur Wing Pinero’s comedy The Magistrate; at Soho Theatre, Action to the Word present their incredibly slick, all-male take on Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a show that was very well-received at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011, returning for a second stint this summer; Soho also presents Arab Nights, a Metta Theatre/ETT co-production of six new short plays inspired by recent events in the Middle East and North Africa which features contributions by Hassan Abdulrazzak and Tania El Khoury.
There’s more new writing, this time from British East Asian playwrights, in Yellow Earth’s Dim Sum Nights at Artsdepot; Mojisola Adebayo and Mamela Nyamza present I Stand Corrected at Oval House, and there’s a chance to see the Mike Bartlett Medea at Richmond Theatre.
Israel’s Batsheva Ensemble present their new work Deca Dance at Sadler’s Wells (a piece which was repeatedly disrupted by protesters when performed in Edinburgh – read Lucy Ribchester’s account here) and later in the week you can see Quimeras, by the renowned Paco Peña Flamenco Dance Company at the same venue.
The Clod Ensemble present their genre-merging new piece Silver Swan, a re-imagining of two 17th-century songs, at the Tate Modern, Rogue Theatre presents The Dancer And The Dark, a mix of dance, music and poetry, at Jackson’s Lane and, from the 22nd November onwards, The Albany in Deptford presents Beyond Circus, a long weekend of contemporary circus and cabaret acts, which includes Tumble Circus’s current show Death or Circus.
