Tarantula – Wednesday 15th January 2025

I saw this one-actor show at The Arcola Theatre, and while it was impressive to see one actor tell a story, I did feel it was unnecessarily bombastic in places.

I’ve said it before, but my experience of people who’ve suffered trauma is that they tend to hold it in, mask it and maybe even repress it. That is difficult for an actor to portray, and requires an audience to notice minute subtitles, but it makes for a much more emotive experience.

It’s far easier to hit the audience over the head with a sledgehammer of shouting and screaming, which is what we got here.

After the show, there was a Q&A with the actor and director, and it became pretty obvious why they made the creative choices they made; they were both young, probably haven’t experienced much in the way of life, or trauma, and the director especially, had a posh accent, so connect the dots if you will.

I tend to be a lot more forgiving of theatre than I am of film, but this show wasn’t great. Plays in London at the moment are all just so damn depressing, as if depressing people was the epitome of high art, when the opposite is true. We live in bleak times; the audience is already depressed, it takes more skill to lift their spirits!