The Politics of Dancing

I Call My Brothers The Gate Theatre Notting Hill Gate 10 November – 03 December What happens when fear and paranoia become as suffocating and pervasive as hunger or pain? This is the theme of the Gate’s new production, I Call My Brothers by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. In the wake of a terrorist attack in Central London anyone of Arabic, Middle Eastern or Pakistani appearance both feel and become suspect. For highly secular and western oriented individuals like Amor, -sharply and empathetically played by Richard Sumitro, - the central character of the play, this can be particularly bewildering, alienating and a deeply oppressive experience. The stark minimalist set accentuates this sense of a world of alienation and disconnect. This is further underlined by the fact that, as in contemporary life, so much of the dialogue is largely conducted, - disconnected, broken up, at cross purposes, - on mobile phone. Drunk coming home from a dance Amor is just another late-night reveller, or...

THE IPHIGENIA QUARTET GATE THEATRE NOTTING HILL  11 Pembridge Road Notting Hill Gate London W11 3HQ Box office: 020 7229 0706* Four plays over two nights presenting a multi-dimensional tragedy, seen from a variety of angles exploring fundamental issues of violence, sacrifice, and civic duty, vanity, motherhood and the predicament of women in the face of male violence. All this concerning events that occurred more than 2000 years ago. Nobody could ever accuse the Gate of lacking ambition. That it all works so powerfully is a credit to the cast who manage to fully convey the immediacy and terrible implications of the crisis faced by the primary protagonists, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Iphigenia. Andrew French  “I am a good man in a dreadful situation….” The drunken Agamemnon declares in the first of the four plays, Agamemnon . “Is that ‘the line’ you’ll use?” Clytemnestra, his wife shoots back as she dissects his self-image with home truths about...

REVIEW IN THE NIGHT TIME (BEFORE THE SUN RISES)  By Nina Segal  The Gate Theatre Notting Hill Feb 4th -27th Following in the footsteps of the extraordinarily powerful Medea, The Gate have again produced an exceptionally intense and powerful drama centred upon the intimacy and claustrophobia of the nuclear family in Nina Segal’s In the Night Time, ‘ proper night time, proper middle of the night, night time…’ For when we have ceased all activity darkness falls and a space is created for the fears to flood in.  Segal presents a world of agonised sleeplessness, of a man and woman driven to the edge by the cries of their new born baby. Outside it is dark, but the couple are only too aware of both all the banal, and terrible, things that are going on in the vast outer world surrounding their tortured intimacy. The crying child is central to the room, to the relationship, to the action that threatens to destroy their relationship. For the child’s cries deprive...