Tezza's Theatre Place

June is world-wide Pride Month and here in London, we end the month with the start of London Pride week, which culminates in the annual Pride in London parade. This year, my London Pride week started with a visit to the Southwark Playhouse where  Full Disclosure Theatre  were putting on a new writing night of eight short plays revealing the naked and entertaining truths about LGBT+ life. The evening started off with  Converting The Preached To  by Niall Urquhart, directed by Louis Catliff. As we took our seats we were welcomed by our Preacher (Linus Karp) who shook hands and said hello to as many as possible. He then proceeded to introduce us to Robert (Ikky Elyas), a new member of our gay conversion therapy group who started to explain his reasons for joining much to the consternation of the Preacher and apparent delight of Dennis (Pedro de Senna) a normally quiet member of the group who blossoms under Robert’s influence. Converting The Preached To  was ...

Tyler Luke Cunningham (Lee) credit – Idil Sukan. Hercule Poirot once said that “ It is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject whatever! Sooner or later they will give themselves away. ” And, in his various cases, this has often proved to be the case. Conversations are a potentially dangerous thing, particularly when two people don’t know each other very well, because no matter how hard someone may try to conceal themselves, the longer they talk the more they are likely to give away. And conversations are at the heart of Gabriel Gbadamosi’s new play  Stop and Search  which has just opened at the Arcola Theatre. In fact, three separate but linked conversations make up this 90-minute one-act production. The first takes place in a car under the driving through a road tunnel under the alps. Driver Tel (Shaun Mason ) has picked up a hitchhiker Akim (Munashe Chirisa) and is taking him through the tunnel with him. ...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/178230/briefs-close-encounters-underbelly-festival-southbank-review/ Briefs Close Encounters: credit Kate Pardey Well the big purple cow may have gone up north for a while but that doesn’t mean the fun is over on the South Bank and taking up residence in the Spiegeltent for the next twelve weeks are a group of talented chaps from Australia who plan to totally blow your mind as they take you to a galaxy far, far away. Welcome to  Briefs: Close Encounters. Sometimes you can gauge the type of show you are about to see by the audience. And the first thing to notice about this group was how excited they were. The queue to get into the tent started about half an hour before the doors opened. Lots of very excited looking people stood laughing together waiting to be let in. Once in, people who had seen the Briefs boys before headed to their favourite seats while everyone milled around – all the seating is unallocated. My companion and I managed to ...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/169092/la-cage-aux-folles-at-new-wimbledon-theatre-review/ La Cage Aux Folles – Pamela Raith Photography Some shows really have more meaning than the writers intended for members of the audience who may have their own memories associated with them. For example,  West Side Story  was the first show I ever saw on the West End,  The Car Man  was my first introduction to dance as an entertainment form in its own right and there other examples. However for memory associations, little comes close to  La Cage Aux Folles  so you can imagine how happy I was to hear that a new production is currently doing a UK tour and I was lucky enough to catch up with the show as it touched down at the New Wimbledon Theatre. La Cage Aux Folles  tells the story of Georges (Adrian Zmed) the owner and Master of Ceremonies of a drag nightclub in St Tropez. The star of the twice-nightly show is George’s partner Albin (John Partridge) w...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/153372/testosterone-new-diorama-theatre-review/ Testosterone by Rhum and Clay Theatre Company – Photo Credit: Richard Davenport for The Other Richard Just over 53 years ago, I arrived into the world and the doctor that was lucky enough to deliver me said four words that have shaped my entire existence ever since “Congratulations, it’s a boy”. As I’ve gone through life, changing from a boy to a man, I, like so many before me, have never actually stopped to think what that means. After all, we just accept that we are men, don’t we? But does anyone actually know what that means? What is a man, and how is a person a man? We don’t question we just accept. However, for some people, this is not as easy as it seems. A point that is expanded upon in Rhum and Clay’s production,  Testosterone , currently running at London’s New Diorama Theatre. Using his own real life experiences, trans-man Kit Redstone, along with other cast members Daniel Jacob, ...