The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer
Dialektikon
Park Theatre, London
IN JACKIE Ivimy’s Dialektikon, Miranda has to make a choice — exist in a world of mindless consumption and turn a blind eye to the suffering of those around her while ignoring the inequalities necessarily produced by her indulgence or look to find another way.
When her nan passes away, she’s transported from her village somewhere in Africa to a world beyond her own, a strange other place ruled over by the evil Moloch. Miranda (Mary Nyambura) is guided through it and towards a rejection of a recognisably capitalist politics by Ayida Wedo (Sabina Cameron). She’s tempted towards those politics by Moloch's servant (Benjamin Victor), who’s part Puck, part Clockwork Orange droog.
This folktale for our time, both fable and political rant, bombards the audience with everything wrong with the world, parading the great men who’ve made a difference but also been fallible and it asks both the audience and Miranda to try to do better.
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
Although this production was in rehearsal before the playwright’s death, it allows us to pay homage to his life, suggests MARY CONWAY
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play


