J Ouvert, Harold Pinter Theatre review - formless yet fabulous theartsdesk.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theartsdesk.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sun 27 Jun 2021 05.30 EDT
It is an unlikely phenomenon in the West End. Women slamming their arguments against the fourth wall of a proscenium arch theatre as if it were a wall of death. Within the past two years,
Six have supplied feminism in farthingales. Now
JâOuvert, the third play in producer Sonia Friedmanâs Re:Emerge season at the Pinter, roars across the stage in Lycra and feathers and sequins, turquoise and pink and scarlet, bumping and grinding. It is greeted, even by a socially distanced, quelled-by-Covid-regs audience, with whoops and a stirring among the stalls: in other circumstances there would be dancing.
J’Ouvert at the Harold Pinter Theatre | Review
June 25, 2021 Last updated:
June 25, 2021
There’s some artistic licence going on in
J’Ouvert, which seems to want to walk a tightrope between drawing in people who wouldn’t ordinarily go to West End theatre performances, and those who, well, would: there’s music, there’s dancing, and the show is set at the Notting Hill Carnival. But it’s not quite the same thing – I’ve been up to the Carnival to see what the fuss was about, and while the costumes here are as colourful and vibrant as they are at the real thing, the music is mostly if not entirely listened to with one’s chest, such is the sheer volume of the bass.