Before we've even begun discussing his latest play, Birdland , I explain to Simon Stephens what the term ‘sausage party' means ("What an extraordinary image," he says), and he tells me he's thinking of commissioning an award for playwrights who've received ten one-star reviews from the Daily Mail . (If you think it can't get better from here, you're wrong.) "It would be a little statue of Quentin Letts with shit coming out of his mouth," he laughs. "And then I'd pass it on to the next writer who got ten one-star reviews. It shouldn't be mine to keep for life." (If you were wondering, various accusations leveled at Stephens by Letts include ‘not seeming to approve of Mrs Thatcher' and being ‘sweary'.) He may jest about being the subject of right-wing vitriol, but Stephens, one of this country's most prolific playwrights, is currently receiving ecstatic praise for his latest play, Birdland , which is currently showing at the Royal Court. He admits to not having read any of the reviews, and laments the loss of real critical thought about theatre in the broadsheets. "If you look right through the history of art, in all its forms, artists have...

(Online here: http://thequietus.com/articles/15639-beth-steel-wonderland-miners-strike-interview) Beth Steel’s new play, Wonderland, is a devastating and potently political piece about what we lost in the 1980s when the mining industry was steadily dismantled. A Nottinghamshire mine, thousands of feet beneath the ground, will arrive in the Hampstead Theatre in June to be clamoured over by a cast of twelve. As we watch young mining apprentices thrown into a way of life that is dirty, dangerous, and hundreds of years old, we’ll also see the quiet policy-makers who are conspiring to take away everything they’ve worked to have. I know – you’re inwardly groaning even to think of the wine-quaffing theatre-goers louching about in the Hampstead bar, casually musing over the plight of the poor. You’re picturing the inevitable privately educated, ambivalent, middle-aged playwright, who sees the lives he explores as intriguing but detachable thematic fodder. But I’m pleased to report that such assumptions would be wrong. Beth Steel is something of a rarity. Born and raised in a pit village in Nottinghamshire – where her dad continues to work as a miner – she left school at sixteen. She didn’t go to university, moved to Greece with her sister for five years where...

Now that I’ve watched Medea and Electra I know everything there is to know about Greek tragedy so I decided to write my own – updated it a bit and made it more modern. Soundtrack by Goldfrapp. Dance moves by me. SERVANT Listen. There is a story to be told. There is a woman wailing in the background off-stage somewhere. Oh, poor Jessie of Maidstone Banished from the Kingdom of Brighton As she has finished her degree and now her tenancy has run out. But to make matters worse, she has been betrayed by a he-devil. ENTER JESSIE I want revenge!!!!!! I call on the Gods to curse him forever!!! He will always have less Twitter followers than me. And never really understand what Slavoj Zizek is going on about, even as much as he pretends. And he will end up working for Rupert Murdoch and voting Conservative And then go to prison for phone hacking the entire cast of the Great British Bake Off. I shall have revenge!!!!! Fucking brilliant!!!! Hahaha!!!! CHORUS You can tell she is in a bit of a state Because she has really smudgy black eye make-up And her clothes are a bit dirty...

If, like me, you’ve been fortunate enough to spend three expensive years paying for the privilege of studying THE ARTS, that self-indulgent whimsy that the Conservatives demand to justify its worth economically, you’ll know teachers like Leonard. After graduating, you realise he was probably full of shit, but while you’re in his thrall, you hang off his every word, genuinely making a note of snippets like ‘Kafka’s decaying body’ and only later realise you aren’t really sure what that actually meant. Except Leonard, the nasty, washed up writer who leads the creative writing seminar that gives Theresa Rebeck’s comedy its name, isn’t really full of shit. He walks around the room, disdainfully dropping the pages of his students’ writing around him as he reads, before delivering short, sharp, blistering critiques – which frequently get side-tracked into rambling, egotistical monologues about smoking crack in Somalia. He’s horrible, sexist, sleeps with his female students, and relishes the power he wields over these bright eyed young writers. But he’s also acutely aware of the pain of being an artist in a capitalist society, and tells them, ‘it’s not the writing that’s the problem. It’s everything else.’ And this is what Rebeck demonstrates...

Online here: http://girlignited.com/2014/07/22/beyond-caring-and-the-zero-hour-generation-this-really-is-the-world-were-living-in-2/ When we were taught about the Great Depression at school, I regarded it with a sense of detached awe. Imagine poverty on that scale, in a ‘first world’ country. That couldn’t happen to people like us, not now, oh no. Surely not. It was only the other day that a culmination of events – including watching Beyond Caring at The Yard – made me realise that my precarious attempt to enter the world of adulthood has been marked by instability and decline. Yes, I know – anyone who says ‘lolz whatever’ because I have been to uni and that, I am well aware that I have experienced some privileges in my life. But I’m also well aware that I have £20k+ of debt, have been priced out of postgrad education, can’t afford to rent my own place, don’t have a stable job, and have been wading through life at the bottom of my overdraft for the last year and that doesn’t look set to change. This is happening EVERYWHERE – but it’s become accepted at the status quo. It’s not okay and we shouldn’t take it. This is the world we are living in: 26% of...

There’s a wonderful quote about libraries – that they’re “hospitals for the mind”. While Clara Brennan’s play Spine is so much more than a powerful polemic for libraries, it is full of gorgeous, startling descriptions of the books that nestle in those buildings: maps, doorways, gentle bombs. Her play, which opens at Soho Theatre this week after moving audiences in Edinburgh this summer and winning a Fringe First, tells the story of Amy, an outspoken, disenfranchised teenager, and Glenda, an activist pensioner with a glint in her eye. Rosie Wyatt, who won a Stage Award for her performance, plays both Amy, all pose and mouth and attitude to begin with, and Glenda as seen through Amy’s eyes. “In the moment of being in the theatre and with the audience, I could tell people were liking it – I’ve never been in a show that’s received as many as standing ovations as Spine did,” she tells me. Spine has grown in size and scope since its beginnings as a short piece for Theatre Uncut, which Wyatt read script-in-hand in Edinburgh two years ago; Brennan was encouraged by director Beth Pitts to develop it as full-length work, and now, following a...

I experienced sheer existential despair the other day for the first time and it was fucking wank. You might think anyone with enough time on their hands to feel sheer existential despair has probably only ever felt mildly uncomfortable at most, but it really was the pits I’m telling you. The reason I ended up there was because some professional medical person told me recently that I might be a bit clinically fed up boo hoo (how INCONVENIENT ), and I was thinking to myself, ‘All I need to do is get from A to B and come out from the in-between bit unscathed'; A = current situation, B = better situation. But then, suddenly I thought, ‘But that’s all life is anyway. A to B. Birth then death and the bit in the middle. Oh man. When you look at it like that it hardly seems worth going on with.’ And then I felt really quite worried and upset and scared and had visions of a big black hole that wasn’t swallowing me up exactly but just lurking directly in front of me all the time saying ‘HELLO BLEAK MISERY IS EVER PRESENT’. It went away after a...

Take a dazzlingly famous, persistently elusive Hollywood star. Study their words and movements from a hundred indistinguishable interviews in heartless hotel rooms. Show what you find: agony and artifice. That’s what Geste Records have done with the ever present but always unreachable Tom Cruise, and the result is an emotionally exhausting portrayal of how sometimes you really can be at your most lonely when you’re in a room full of people. Using a verbatim mix of Cruise’s own words, balletic physical movement, haunting choral soundscapes, there’s more than a touch of David Lynch to this eerie study of the interior world of an icon. Celebrity and all its pitfalls are fertile but well-trodden ground, and so much here could have descended into cliché – but it doesn’t, thanks to the company’s restraint and intelligent vision. We’re never presented with a parody – never do we find ourselves thinking, “oh, they’re doing the bit where he jumped on the sofa!” - and yet, their ability to recreate Cruise’s body language is remarkable. It’s never an impersonation, but immediately we know it’s him; here are those physical tics that previously passed us by, but under the microscope become agonizing compulsions. That...

Online here: http://girlignited.com/2014/05/31/ten-women-get-naked-in-front-of-a-room-full-of-strangers/ I’ve spent days thinking about my body recently. (“Wow, Thompson, you self-involved wanker.”) It’s been like an archaeological expedition – I’ve uncovered things from my past that I had no way of understanding the implications of at the time. They’ve gone forgotten, unnoticed for so long, and it’s a sign of their subtle damage that it takes a concentrated effort even to remember. There were memories about picking dental floss-esque G-strings out of my bum when I was 14, or spending my third year of university analysing whether I had a double-chin in every single photo taken of me. There was also the bittersweet pride I felt when I first met real boys and they said I was a “baghead”. When I asked what that meant, I was told, “it means you’d be fit if someone put a bag over your head”. “Great,” I thought, “At least people think I’ve got a good body!!!” This all culminated last night when I watched Jackdaw’s work-in-progress piece Ten Women at the Ovalhouse. It made me realise, we need to talk about our bodies. And WHY WE HATE THEM SO MUCH. So, the amazing thing about the title of...

Online here: http://girlignited.com/2014/06/30/art-and-how-it-kicks-my-arse-in-twelve-different-ways/ I don’t know what has happened to me and my relationship with art since I finished my degree but- “You became a wanky pretentious twat,” I hear you interject. Well, that’s open to interpretation isn’t it, JUST LIKE ART. No but seriously, a time seemed to occur when I got more contemplative about art – when I say art I mean books, plays, films, whatever – and it started to affect me more profoundly than ever before. When I say it affected me profoundly what I basically mean is it either makes me cry for about two hours, or it renders me momentarily incapable of speech (quite a feat as Morrissey actually wrote Bigmouth Strikes Again about ME). I’m not sure why this is happening. Is it because I am getting more jaded about life and therefore have more fucked up shit to empathise with? Because art is generally about fucked up shit isn’t it?? I know I’ve already used up my nine lives of not making everyone vomit so far by using the expression ‘my relationship with art’ and referring to myself as ever being ‘contemplative’, but seriously I am temporarily paralysed by what I’ve...

It’s not the play that’s the thing this time, but the car park. Oh yes, The Theory of Everything’s Titus is performed in a disused car park in Peckham, and like the venue’s namesake – Bold Tendencies – it’s a bold production, though its most daring moments come in staccato flashes. Shakespeare’s goriest play walks a lopsided line between tragedy and farce, but here it blends inconspicuously into a grim 2014 setting, a place of beheadings, bombings and wreckage. The company’s multi-sensory storytelling methods capture the eeriness of the unthinkable muddled alongside the ordinary, creating a sensation of discomfort and anxiety at a world that currently seems overwhelmingly violent. Such moments appear inconsistently, but, when they do, they succeed in setting this production apart. The performance begins with the brash beeping of a car horn and our tentative entrance into the concrete auditorium is greeted by a funereal chorus. As soon as the play proper begins, the actors impose themselves on the audience, and whilst this doesn’t always work, in its bravest moments – Aaron thrusting his baby at an unwitting audience member, Tamora wordlessly forcing an on-looker to tie up her cape – it efficiently indicates how little...

Over 450,000 people ‘like’ Britain First on Facebook, a group who fashion themselves as a ‘patriotic political party’. A quick browse of their page shows that hunting down ‘Muslim extremists’, keeping Scotland in the Union, and tributes to ‘our boys’ are all pretty high up their agenda. Britain Furst, on the other hand, a parody group set up to mock BF, has over 85,000 likes – including nine of my Facebook friends. But, then, I’d expect this to be so since my social circle is predominantly made up of privileged middle class left-wingers. Why wouldn’t they oppose a far right extremist group? But on further investigation, the page is riven with naked contempt towards the working class; one post deriding ‘little Englanders’ says, ‘Recreate your holiday by wandering into Greggs wearing swimming trunks, pointing at a sausage roll, shouting TWO and paying with a £50 note’. The comments beneath are worse: ‘If Greggs was shut down, the special needs, tracksuit-clad toilets would starve and die off and the humans could all live in peace’. In their clamour to prove their hatred of intolerance, they’ve actually ended up mocking some of the most vulnerable people in our society – ironic...

An essay about feminist theatre in 2014 originally published on The Quietus. It focuses on Blurred Lines at The Shed and Rapture, Blister, Burn at the Hampstead.  Online link here: http://thequietus.com/articles/14491-blurred-lines-rapture-blister-burn-feminist-theatre

An essay for The Quietus on Alan Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business and Julian Mitchell's Another Country. Online here: http://thequietus.com/articles/14996-theatre-another-country-a-small-family-business-ideology-capitalism-communism-politics

A review of King Charles III at the Almeida Theatre. Written for The Quietus.  Online here: http://thequietus.com/articles/15222-king-charles-iii-almeida-review

The ancient and the new are intermingling in Barely Human Puppets ’ production of Beowulf. The company knowingly declare this with their first, startling image: one of their members sits quietly reading a book, and then suddenly pulls off the dust sheets around her with a flourish. Beneath them are not moth-bitten items of furniture, but the rest of the company, who now spring to life. Craig Jordan-Baker has taken on the formidable task of adapting the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf, and does so with a fearless poetic relish. His bold update of the legend meets its match in the work of Barely Human Puppets, whose production is imbued with a wry humour and an unsettling other-worldliness. Beowulf, in its original form, is an epic poem written in Old English. It documents the young warrior Beowulf’s attempts to slay the great beast Grendel, who is causing havoc and bloody destruction across King Hrothgar’s Denmark. This production handpicks the themes of the poem that chime with a modern audience: the importance of culture and storytelling, hero and celebrity, and our relationship with our past. It is an enchanting multi-sensory experience. Jordan-Baker’s words are engagingly brought to life by Tom Dussek, cast...

How often do you seen an LGBT play for kids, that is not only of huge social and political importance, but completely and utterly heart-lifting? I suspect the answer is ‘not very often’. This makes Super Paua’s pioneering new play Aunty Ben something of rarity. It tells the story of nine-year-old Tracey, who wants to be a pirate when she grows up. She has two best friends – Sammy, who wants to be a dancer, and Anto, who wants to be a footballer (even though he secretly quite likes baking but wants to keep that on the down-low for fear of getting teased). Tracey impresses her friends by telling them about her Aunty Ben, who is like “a meteorite that fell out of the sky trailing glitter”. They’re desperate to meet her – until they do, and find out Aunty Ben is actually Tracey’s uncle, and wears make-up and dresses. Subsequently, people at school start to call Tracey ‘Tranny Tracey’, and, although it never bothered her before, she anxiously asks Ben why he can’t dress like a man. Guided by Ben and her mum, Tracey begins a journey of discovering why it’s okay to be different – but also...

In their new show Invisible Giant, Feral Theatre have created a political carnival for kids. An engaging fusion of music, poetry, puppetry and physical movement, it documents our painful relationship with plastic in a way that is touchingly human. Beginning in a world that doesn’t feel quite like ours, we meet the eclectically dressed S.C.U.Z. (Synthetics Collectors in Underground Zones). They are perplexed by plastic: they know that humans loved it, but they don’t know why or what it was for. There’s a sense that they occupy a post-apocalyptic world as they speak in fragmented words and scuttle around like twitchy nocturnal creatures. The journey of understanding begins with the story of a couple. We witness all the milestones of their unremarkable existence, tracing their marriage, work and domestic life, always marked by the banal and ubiquitous presence of plastic. Every time they type an email, answer the phone, or turn on the TV, plastic is there propping it all up. Their lives are also marked by a frenzied urgency to ensure they get rid of rubbish every week on bin day. The trajectory is clear: we consume things, we throw them away, then we want to make sure...

MAFIA? by Sleeping Trees, Brighton Fringe You may be having too much fun watching Sleeping Trees ’ new show to notice how innovative this young comedy ensemble are, but it’s clear that Mafia? is one of a kind. Sleeping Trees consists of three talented comedians, James Dunnell-Smith, Joshua George Smith and John Woodburn, a trio previously known for re-jiggling Homer, Enid Blyton and Robert Louis Stevenson to suit their comedic purposes. Now, a belated viewing of The Godfather has inspired them to set their sights on the gangster film genre, with hilarious consequences. That may not sound like the most original idea in the world, but combine it with a live band, relentless pacing and physical comedy that’s exhausting to watch, and this becomes something quite special. In an hour – and with the help of an evocative musical backdrop provided by the Physics House Band – we are transported around every well-worn haunt of Godfathers and Goodfellas alike, from the confessional box to the opera and from a mother’s deathbed to a Mexican prison. No narrative device is safe: Sleeping Trees destroy every cliché, one pretend handgun at a time, from the unjustly targeted babies in prams to...

Theatre special in my student newspaper, The Badger, on the occasion of Terence Rattigan's centenary year. It contains reviews of the production of 'Flare Path' starring Sienna Miller, and 'Cause Celebre' starring Anne-Marie Duff, as well as a biography of Rattigan. 

An interview with Nathaniel Parker during rehearsals for Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall at the RSC. Originally published on A Younger Theatre.