Utopia
Anthony Neilson, Janice Okoh & Simon Stephens Dylan Moran
Utopia
What is utopia? Is it found in the physical realm, in the love of another person or even within a feeling? Leading contemporary writers including Dylan Moran & Simon Stephens offer us their visions of a perfect world. From spaceships and retirement homes, to political rallies and facebook, no stone has been left unturned in our quest for paradise.
1.9 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Location |
London |
| Venue |
Soho Theatre |
| Director |
Max Roberts & Steve Marmion |
| Cast |
Laura Elphinstone, Rufus Hound, Pamela Miles, Sophia Miles, David Whitaker Tobi Bakare |
| From |
June 2012 |
| Until |
July 2012 |
| Box Office |
020 7478 0100 |
| |
What is utopia? Is it found in the physical realm, in the love of another person or even within a feeling? Leading contemporary writers including Dylan Moran & Simon Stephens offer us their visions of a perfect world. From spaceships and retirement homes, to political rallies and facebook, no stone has been left unturned in our quest for paradise.
Reviews
The Stage
Natasha Tripney
“There is more moral shading to the production than the original set up would suggest and beneath all the clowning and the silliness and the singing of songs, the production touches on the ambiguity of perfection - that one person’s utopia might be hell to someone else. But it takes a long, long time to reach this point.”
22/06/2012
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The Times
Dominic Maxwell
“The cast start with a Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop-style recap of Utopias through the ages, which reminds us that all ideas of a perfect society eventually crash and burn. But the routines that ensue are either reminders of how dreams lead to disappointment ... or uninspired spoofs of perfection. One four-line poem by Tim Key, one of the quotes about Utopia projected on to the set between scenes, is short and sharp and funny enough to highlight the lack of focus elsewhere.”
26/06/2012
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The Guardian
Lyn Gardner
“I have my suspicions that the initially confusing format, in which many of the sketches are chopped up and threaded through each other, is a ruse to disguise lack of content and gravitas rather than a bold experiment in form.
”
27/06/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Holly Williams
“Utopia is far too long to sustain this bite-size format, ending up neither a meaty exploration of a big subject, nor multi-faceted comic riff on it.”
01/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
Jane Edwardes
“There’s some improvement later, with Simon Stephens’s spoof on nirvana and Alistair McDowall’s satire about a warlord troubled by his Facebook ratings, but by then the utopian ideal has long since lost its appeal.
”
01/07/2012
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Time Out
Patrick Marmion
“This ungainly collaboration resembles nothing so much as a camel - a horse designed by committee.”
25/06/2012
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The Evening Standard
Fiona Mountford
“The format of the punishingly long evening is a series of sketches, each one slightly worse than the last, from which no writer emerges with any credit ... and for a piece that’s meant to be worrying at the notion of a perfect world, they’re incredibly depressing too. What’s even worse is that directors Steve Marmion and Max Roberts, two men who ought to know better, have chopped the scenes up so like a novel form of water torture we keep being forced to return to the Spaceship for Humanity and to the crotchety former MP. Or rather, the scenes keep repeating on us, like a noxious takeaway.”
25/06/2012
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