Last year her strung-out production of Summer and Smokeshivered Tennessee Williams to his core. Rebecca Frecknall is proving an exceptional reimaginer of familiar and neglected works. This is the first of a new Jamie Lloyd season. Tom Edden also shines, delivering his rap with a gimlet sneer. These characters are their voices: when soldiers die they take off their mics.Īnita-Joy Uwajeh is a wonderfully poised and edgy Roxane Michele Austin a gorgeous, punchy presence, who puts the poetry into patisserie, as a gourmet maker of both lemon tarts and tart verses. And perfect as part of the landscape in a play about sound and words. It is the ur-stage sound: made on the spot by human beings both internal and explosive. Beatbox (given another life I would try to make it my profession) is a rising theatrical force: brought to the National by the wonderful Grace Savage five years ago and gloriously incarnated in BAC’s Frankenstein. Not least because Vaneeka Dadhria’s magnificent beatboxing – gulping, pulsing, hissing, ticking – continuously gees up the rhythm. There is an excited, concentrated listening to Crimp’s escalating rhyme feats: “attitude” swims into “latitude“ then sends itself up with “platitude”. Audience and actors are clinched together in – I can hardly believe it – rhyme: like two halves of a couplet.

There is hardly any manly running around there is often stillness Soutra Gilmour’s design – plywood walls and orange stackable chairs – is aggressively non-plumey and plain. Fighting takes the form of poetry slams: combatants see each other off with great jousts of words.

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