Internet outage; does horror belong on stage?; Raspberry Pi computers in theatre; new podcast episode: Jessica Norman on her play This Little Earth at the Arcola
News, reviews, features and podcast on theatre across the UK
The British Theatre Guide Newsletter
No 1235: 26 October 2025
Editorial
Were you affected by the Internet outage earlier this week? The failure of one Amazon data centre in the US took out UK banks, government services and doorbell cameras and a great deal more. BTG does have to rely on some big companies to stay online, but Amazon isn’t one of them, so you could still access us.
The issue was with DNS—Domain Name Servers, which take what you type into your browser and direct you to whichever computer around the world holds the information you have requested. It’s simple in principle but very difficult to sort out when it goes wrong. One of the techies I follow on YouTube even sells t-shirts that say, “it was DNS”.
Predictably, it provoked discussions about whether so many essential services should be trusted to so few companies, just like the last time it happened, and probably the next.
As we approach Hallowe’en, we have reviews this week of Guildford Shakespeare Company’s production of Frankenstein and a production in Canada of the Benjamin Britten opera The Turn of the Screw based on the ghostly novel by Henry James. Earlier this month, I reviewed a comedy version of the former in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, the musical adaptation, plus there were a few jump scares and suggestions of ghostly goings-on in Alan Ayckbourn’s Snake in the Grass at the Bolton Octagon.
But is horror as a genre suited to the stage? That’s something Philip Fisher debates in his feature this week, starting by examining a couple of horror festivals, although it doesn’t seem that Philip is a fan of horror in any medium.
In the latest edition of Raspberry Pi Magazine (the Raspberry Pi is a low-cost single-board computer created in Cambridge in 2012 for educational use but extremely versatile for all sorts of projects), I came across an article about a theatre company that had used a Pi 5 to control a full-sized mummified ‘bog body’ that sat up and pointed at the actor on stage. I’ve not tackled anything quite that adventurous, but I was proud of myself for designing and programming a repeating sequence of Hallowe’en-themed animations on an LED panel controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller—currently running in our front window.
Horrors confronting us in the modern world include misinformation / disinformation and the climate crisis, which are both confronted by Jessica Norman’s play This Little Earth, long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, which is reviewed this week at the Arcola Theatre in London by Howard Loxton.
But that’s not all; a couple of days before it opened, I had a lovely chat with the writer about her play about two flat-earthers travelling to Antarctica to try to find the end of the world. This is only the second play she has written, but she spoke eloquently about the process of bringing it to the stage and the subjects that it covers, which you can hear in episode number 305 of our podcast.
Alongside the production are a couple of extra but related one-off events: an after-show discussion featuring a panel including Jessica and author and journalist Gabriel Gatehouse (The Coming Storm), Emeritus Professor of Anomalistic Psychology Chris French and CEO of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust Camilla Nichol and the Antarctic Climate Café, where people can come and talk about their worries about the climate crisis.
But a more immediate worry is that it is only 60 days to Christmas. I really need to get our Christmas cards printed…
Birmingham Rep's Rep Together, aims to raise funds to subsidise 5,000 £5 tickets for young people for its production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Dead Man Walking (English National Opera) - London Coliseum, London, –
Paddington The Musical (Sonia Friedman Productions, STUDIOCANAL and Eliza Lumley Productions on behalf of Universal Music UK) - Savoy Theatre, London, –
