The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer
Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp.
Royal Court Theatre, London
IN EACH of these four short pieces, Caryl Churchill suggests that myth, fairy tale, religion and Shakespeare are all just narratives we choose to believe in — or not.
In opener Glass, a girl befriends a boy whose father is abusive. Their friendship allows him to escape but leaves Rebekah Murrell’s poignantly played Glass Girl fractured and broken.
Kill has the gods retelling and distilling the stories of the House of Atreus, boiling them down into an absurd and horrific violent essence, while in Bluebeard’s Friends, four dinner-party guests express their disbelief that their great friend, Bluebeard, can have murdered multiple wives.
WILL STONE witnesses an experimental piano concerto inspired by the work of a young Jewish victim of the Nazis
MARIA DUARTE recommends the ambitious portrait of an agricultural community confronted by the trauma of enclosure
JAN WOOLF finds out where she came from and where she’s going amid Pete Townshend’s tribute to 1970s youth culture
JOHN GREEN, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Holloway, The Last Journey, Red Path and Elio


