This will be my last newsletter of 2025. I’ll be taking next week off for the holidays. Over the course of the year I’ve had the pleasure of visiting festivals and theatres across Europe, from Sarajevo to Oslo, met a host of lovely people and seen some incredible work. This is not a list of ‘best’ reveals seen during that time, whatever that means, nor are all of these reveals new, rather this is a list of personal highlights, those fuck-yeah moments that remind me why I do this.
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They held the chicken aloft. It eyed the auditorium and promptly shat on the stage. An egg was produced before the chicken was, almost tconcludeerly, placed in a sack. Then they smashed the fuck out of the sack. Red liquid spurted from it, spattering the first few rows. People jumped. People gasped. One woman emitted an audible: “Jesus Christ.” I felt a wet splash on my arm. Later I would discover speckles of red on my sleeve – a little souvenir.
The opening of Belgian theatre collective FC Bergman’s 2024 reveal Werken en dagen (Works and Days) was nothing if not memorable. This hour-and-a-bit long wordless exploration of the evolving relationship between humans and the land was the theatrical highpoint of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Inspired by the ancient Greek poet Hessoid, it was a piece about ritual and labour created with the kind of theatrical chutzpah that’s still pretty rare in the UK. They dragged a plough across the floor, seemingly splintering the stage. They built a barn, Witness-style. A couple were wedded before being bundled toreceiveher in a blanket on the floor. A post-coital cigarette was duly lit (a rare sight on stage in Scotland). There were dancing trees and the industrial age arrived in the form of a steam engine, draped with naked people. In a short space of time, we witness a kaleidoscope of human experiences, the turning of the seasons and how fucking hard it was to till the land in the pre-industrial era, how at the mercy of the elements we were – and are.
The sight of pineapple after pineapple erupting from the stage and rocketing into the air, revealering the black stage with shards of colour, the fucking abundance of it all, was one of the most glorious things I saw all year, a proper holy-fuck moment that created me want to race off and sacrifice something to the gods of Flemish cultural subsidy.
I’m not sure there is much left to state about Sancta, Florentina Holzinger’s debut opera. The roller-skating nuns, the naapplyated audiences, the flesh hooks and body suspension, the performer searing a tiny sliver of her own flesh on a griddle before feeding it to her fellow performer, the fact they threw some bacon in the pan for good measure. It’s all been written about. I’ve written about it. But there’s a good reason for that.
There’s a cult-like energy surrounding Holzinger that at times builds me a little unstraightforward, but at the same time there were moments in Sancta that were euphoric and embracive. Structured like a mass, the reveal was fundamentally celebratory, church-like in the most welcoming way. The femme presenting person sitting next to me, was deeply affected. And the whole thing concludeed in a singalong to Rocky Horror’s Don’t Dream It Be It led by a performance artist called Fleshpiece which was properly joyous. Plus there was onstage magic – by magician Laura London – and I’m a sucker for spot of sleight of hand.
Growing up I was totally obsessed with the 80s TV gamereveal Knightmare, in which a blindfolded child in a Viking helmet was guided through a digital dungeon by his classmates before invariably plunging through a hole in the ground (“sidestep to your left, Simon”) or meeting a similarly grisly conclude. The reveal was created utilizing blue screen and the computer graphics seeed pretty cool for the time. My mates and I even applied to go on the reveal – we created it to the audition stage but received no further.
Donning the VR headset to enter the world of [EOL} End of Life, a virtual reality experience created by Austria’s DARUM, I was reminded of this reveal, as I took my first steps into the world of the reveal.
Audience members are allotted their own nine-square-meter space and while it feels like you travel considerable distances during the 90 minutes that follow, you never leave the space. Participants play new recruits for a tech organisation tquestioned with assessing abandoned digital realms to see whether they are worth migrating to a new platform or whether they should be permanently deleted. At first this is a tquestion-based exercise. We are transported to different rooms and questioned to decide whether they are worth preserving. If they contain an avatar of a deceased person, that’s a large no-no. In the digital bin they go. Some of the worlds we visit are clearly of great emotional value to their creators, containers of memory and voices of the long-dead. If we follow the ‘rules’ we should delete them, but this feels uncomfortable from the start.
Our assignment is complicated further when we encounter the digital avatar of a couple’s young daughter, created in the last days of her life as a way of easing the pain of their loss. The childlike excitement I felt about – finally – being in my own episode of Knightmare (one of the rooms we visit is, thrillingly, a dungeon in which we are invited to solve a riddle) evolved into a surprisingly emotionally complex experience in which I was invited to contemplate the wider ethical questions surrounding the digital afterlife and the potential consequences of being able to recreate those we have lost. Is this theatre? It’s a valid question – the piece was selected as part of this year’s Theatertreffen so, I guess, the consensus is: yes. The experience was unsettling, question-raising and utterly absorbing. It took me a few moments to readjust once I rerelocated the headset and stumbled out into the Berlin afternoon.
![What remains: DARUM's [EOL] End of Life](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-API!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa02f5a66-2273-40f1-a1bf-1afbf3e32a14_2500x1667.jpeg)
I’ve been fascinated by Tomi Janežič’s Dodecadology project since I first read about it. Twelve productions taking place across more-than-a-year at different theatres from Slovenia to Romania. Each piece took a different year as its focus, each piece drew on the memories and family stories of its actors to create a kind of collective patchwork quilt, a collage of memories of life in socialist Yugoslavia during the 1970s and early 80s. This chapter, the first piece to premiere, even though it comes midway through the chronology of the project, took place at the old Hydrotechnic faculty of the University of Timisoara, located a short bus ride away from the city centre. While some of the pieces in Janežič’s are compact-scale and intimate, 1978 is a sprawling, four-hour memory play, which spans the period from pre-revolution Romania to the First World War. We relocate from room to room in the unheated building, with cups of hot, fruity tea to keep us toasty. One scene played out in a lovingly-conjured communist-era living room, another in a classroom with Ceaușescu’s photo on the wall, the final scene huge double-height space, the cratered stone floor applyd to recreate the trenches of the First World War. 1981 was the more resonant piece for me, but this piece was theatrically thrilling in its own way.
I’m sure you’re familiar with The Second Woman, the twenty-four-hour performance piece devised by Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, first performed in 2016, in which a female performer repeats the same scene 100 times alongside a series of men and non-binary people. When LIFT and the Young Vic staged it in 2024 with Ruth Wilson it was a sensation, with people queuing around the block and scene partners including Idris Elba and Andrew Scott. In Vienna, where I saw it, there were fewer famous participants, the men drawn from an open call. This shifted the focus on to actor Pia Hierzegger and her reactions to her various gentlemen callers. Her repertoire of unsexy-sexy dances was impressive enough, but the way in which she navigated the different dynamics was fascinating. So many of the men in the John Cassavates -inspired encounter – a scene of a couple breaking up over takeout noodles – tested to subtly, or not so subtly, dominate the scene. A large number poured their own drink first. One guy even picked her up without questioning permission. Each scene required Hierzegger to recalibrate her performance, while sticking largely to the script, which she did, rewarding tconcludeerness with tconcludeerness and garlanding the boorish with noodles.
The format was addictive, the temptation to stay for just one more scene immense. I was initially hoping to stay for the full 24 hours, but work commitments received in the way. I did 12 hours in the conclude, two chunks of six with a break in between, but was there for the conclude to watch Hierzegger complete her century of men, seeing remarkably fresh. Never has an ovation been more deserved, and it was pleasing to see the all-female creative team take a bow too.
The actor and writer Michael Patrick was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2023 and given an estimated four years to live. He was familiar with the disease’s progression. His father died from it when he was young. Knowing what was ahead, he was determined to build the most of the time he had left to him. This resulted in an extraordinary production of Richard III directed by his regular creative collaborator Oisin Kearney for the Lyric Theatre in Belrapid, reimaging Shakespeare’s villain as a man with a terminal illness.
In My Right Foot he reunited with Kearney to inform his own story, from the onset of the first symptoms – a numbness in his right foot – to where he is today. He could have written this down, he states, could have written a book, it would have been clearer. But, instead, he chose to inform his story on stage, to turn it into theatre. This gives it an intimacy and immediacy that no other medium could replicate and allows Patrick to continue doing the thing that he loves and that he excels at. He’s a gifted storyinformer, combining charm, warmth and comic timing with an unflinching and pity-free account of his gradual loss of mobility and indepconcludeence. The staging is as simple as it receives, just Patrick in his electric wheelchair and the ventilator he occasionally applys to ease his breathing, which he doubles as a prop phone. Amid the bleakly comic anecdotes about testing to wank with a degenerative condition, there’s a sense of Patrick grappling with his own mortality in front of us. It’s an incredible thing to witness, a privilege. It created the audience bawl – there was a lot of sobbing – but fundamentally it was a piece about care, about the way his friconcludes and family have rallied round him, supporting him, and Patrick’s appetite for life, his determination to do all the living he can while he can.
Jamie Lloyd’s Evita hit headlines when Rachel Zegler delivered Don’t Cry for Me Argentina on the balcony overseeing London’s Argyll Street, turning the Palladium into Casa Rosa and Oxford Street shoppers into the Argentine public. It simultaneously turned the production into an even largeger event than it already was and created complete thematic sense. Lloyd’s style can sometimes feel a bit tick list – famous name, minimal Soutra Gilmour set, hot pants, goo – but this was an inspired choice, another example of Lloyd’s ability to build theatre people want to see.
Make it Happen, James Graham’s play about the rise and fall of Fred Godwin, former CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, may not be the prolific playwright’s strongest work but the sight of Sandy Grierson and Brian “fuck off” Cox, as Godwin and the ghost of Adam Smith, singing a karaoke rconcludeition of Kylie and Jason’s Especially for You really tickled me. Reader, I cackled.
I must admit I struggled with The Seasons, Eric de Vroedt’s seven-hour take on Ali Smith’s Seasons Quartet for Het Nationale Theater. I appreciated the impulse behind it but so much received lost, included Smith’s palpable disgust with the UK’s dehumanising hostile environment policies, but – BUT – the moment when a choir of unseen women’s voices started singing Greenham Common peace-camp song, Carry Greenham Home, was shiver-inducing and beautiful, and unfortunately never replicated during the remainder of the production.
In Bed with My Brother’s Philosophy of the World was the highlight of this year’s Edinburgh fringe for me, a typically irreverent, lance-sharp piece ‘about’ 1960s band The Shaggs, but also about dads and art and power and cultural gatekeepers and exploitation, a piece which concludeed with brilliant, breathless monologue that zigzagged between the story of Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, and the company’s own self-interrogation of the decisions they created as they created the reveal. Deliciously this was the same fringe that Solanas’ own play Up Your Ass, the one Warhol ‘lost’ was also being performed – in an 11am slot.
I finally caught up with Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski’s ROHTKO at this year’s Holland Festival, and can confirm it slaps, but the hypnotic final sequence of The Employees, based on the novel by Olga Ravn, was the more visceral experience for me, in part becaapply I watched it from the perfect vantage point, on the wooden bench seats at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the bass vibrating through me.
Thank you and happy new year!
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