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Exeunt Magazine
@exeuntmagazine.bsky.social
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Longform, thoughtful coverage of the UK's theatre landscape. Find us at exeuntmagazine.substack.com
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exeuntmagazine.bsky.social
Gorgeous work in here by @ogdenlaurie.bsky.social with @floomahony.bsky.social's words for @wearezooco.bsky.social!
Putting Perfect Show for Rachel on stage has always felt like a rebellious and radical act. My big sister Rachel, who is learning disabled and lives in a care home, directs the show live from her tech desk with 50+ buttons that different trigger scenes, songs, dances, chats and games. All of these are things that Rachel loves – from from Kylie Minogue to massive fights to waving at boys – and she gets to decide and control the order they happen in, in each and every performance. The show explores who defines artistic taste, who is currently excluded from making art, and who gets to decide what art is “perfect”. In the first iteration of the show, we experimented with a garage track by The Streets called ‘Who’s Got the Bag?’ It’s still in the show, because it’s a big, big hit for Rachel. It’s also a song with back-to-back drugs references – not a song you might have assumed Rachel will like. But Rachel loves an angry boy shouting, she loves naughtiness, she loves the repetition of “who’s got the bag” and how it reflects one of her in-jokes about how our family is always losing stuff – our phones, our bags. Image (taken by Ikim Yum) of an orange hazy stage with seven figures stood facing different directions, white text on back drop with musical notes reading 'I DON'T GIVE A DAMN 'BOUT' above some windows. In fact, it was imperative that this process was focused on attending to our own changes within ourselves, and not to try to change Rachel whatsoever. Disabled people experience us trying to make them ‘more like us’ constantly. This show had to be the opposite. But what we’ve discovered is that in changing the environment and people around her, of course, Rachel changes too. We’ve become more trustworthy, we’ve shown her ‘if you throw me the ball, I’ll catch it more often’ – and so Rachel’s throwing the ball more and more. She’s telling us more and more about who she is, what she likes, needs and wants. In these moments, Rachel doesn’t need to rely solely on the buttons anymore: she’ll just start that direction in an improvisational sense. And we’re ready to catch that. It’s clear she’s really flexing what this show can be. Image (by Ikin Yum) of a blue, green, purple and orange-lit stage with seven performers all in exuberant outstretched poses, with text reading 'THIS IS PERFECT SHOW FOR RACHEL' on the backdrop above the windows, with music notes
November 11, 2025 at 1:20 PM
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A few glimpses - for the full (brilliant) piece, subscribe to Exeunt for only a fiver a month!
Wednesday 16 April 2025 – the day the Supreme Court ruled that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, sex is binary and decided by biology – wasn’t great for trans people in the UK. Scratch that: it wasn’t great for anyone in the UK who thrives on complexity, cares for human difference, or is committed to social transformation through feminist living. There was, however, one place it was possible to feel positive that day. At the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in Brighton, Emma Frankland gave the first performance of No Apologies: a new show that begins with the possibility that Kurt Cobain was a trans woman but ends in a thrilling call for community and resistance. The ethical consideration with which Emma handles the story of Kurt Cobain in No Apologies has, she believes, helped her reach “people who are outside the trans community, who are really moved by the honouring of Kurt. I was so nervous about talking about Kurt Cobain, but I’ve learned over the years that the more personal you are about something, the more that allows an audience to see themselves in it as well. It also gives a kind of authority: if I say I was 14 when this album came out and it affected me, then I’m talking about something that I’m an expert on. And that feels a safer way to hold that potentially more difficult conversation of talking about someone else’s gender identity, which I don’t have a right to know.” At the same time, it helps her appreciate what’s positive in the present. “We’ve got this generation, maybe even more than a generation, of young transgender, gender non-conforming, people coming through who don’t know a world where Trans Pride didn’t exist. Who don’t know a world where trans celebrities didn’t exist, where trans literature didn’t exist. What I’m talking about in No Apologies, that question of ‘what do you do when you’ve got no fucking role models’, is not the case now.”
August 1, 2025 at 10:18 AM
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Annnd also in today’s piece - we’re delighted that Exeunt is once more hosting Natasha Tripney’s annual big fringe poem…. Entirely made up of snippets from the official Edinburgh fringe programme
July 25, 2025 at 11:00 AM
exeuntmagazine.bsky.social
Free for all to read: heaven or hell?
A woman holding a mic stand (or a mop?) and a mic in the other hand sings into it, in front of a poster for Paul O'Grady in the musical Annie, with audience members laughing or singing along A selfie of the writer Anya Ryan, her boyfriend and her sister, who's taking the picture, posing with their cocktails in a bar with coloured windows
June 17, 2025 at 9:23 AM
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Hefty piece this one so a lot before the cut for all readers, but for the full Container report, subscribe today! exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/containerh...
Container’s concern is the love and suffering involved with the enforcing and crossing of borders of all kinds. One of its primary tools is the relationship between what we say and do to each other. It has the truth of speech in it without being verbatim, juxtaposing the seemingly directly personal and romantic alongside approaching threat, characteristic of Alan’s writing. Container slows you down to make you notice what speech does, how performance works through speech: even when seemingly stripped down, how full it is. Photo taken by Frey of five performers stood in front of rainbow-coloured rolling stacks at the National Poetry Library, with blue lights behind them and audience members' heads. Text reads: FIFTH: LIBRARY 5 February 2025, Special Edition @ National Poetry Library I write some of this piece in the National Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, which I first visit when Container performs here. When I sign up for my free membership, the person at the desk tells me I can do work in here, as long as it's poetry-related. I wonder if she polices this violently herself, but clearly Container made the cut. Though I hope it plays in further weird places to come, the NDT run feels closest to a definitive version. I think about gigs and setlists. There are bits of past Container that don’t appear in the Container at NDT now. I’ve got to do something with all of this inside me. I’m a repository of Container. I am a container full of Container.
April 4, 2025 at 9:40 AM
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Plus! some ace pics from Fleischle of her designs and model boxes, for shows including Home, I’m Darling, 2:22 A Ghost Story, and Death of a Salesman
March 4, 2025 at 10:23 AM
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What lurks beneath the surface...
It’s LGBTQ+ History Month, which means that logically you might expect an article talking about the rare beast that is queer theatre and where it might be found (Soho, Southwark Playhouse, Pleasance), its themes (subversive, political, sexy), its remuneration (poor), and its future (sparkling bright). And next year I may well return to writing that article, in some form, as is my time-honoured February tradition. But this year, things are different. I’m seeing queer themes seep into surprising places, making un-signposted interventions into massive shows. Like Elphaba, “I have been changed” – not through a homoerotic friendship with a delusional blonde, but through an encounter with some incredibly horny trains. Photo of Ncuti Gatwa, a Black man with short hair and a sharply-shaved parting, smiling and looking out of the corner of his eyes while sat at a piano against a blue background. Gatwa is wearing an ornate pink dress with an oversized pink bow, pink socks and suspenders. ALBUS: You do know, right? That Scorpius is the most important person in my life. That he might always be the most important. He looks at his son. He knows this is important. He smiles. He knows. HARRY: I know. And I like it. In fact, I really like him. And if he’s the most important person in your life then I’d say that’s a very good thing.
February 21, 2025 at 11:57 AM
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Photos by Mihaela Bodlovic!
I need to tell you something. It’s not easy to say, so I’ll start with a story. Ease you into it. Ease me into it. This is a coming out, of sorts. It all came to a head when I was at brunch with three friends. We meet up every few months to drink coffee and bitch about how journalism is a dying industry – but we love it so we keep on keeping on. These meet-ups are fun, I always enjoy them. But this time, it was different. We were in a particularly shiny restaurant. Lots of glass and aluminium; the noise of the other diners’ conversations ricocheted and amplified. It sounded more like the crowd at the Pyramid Stage at Glasto than The experience of seeing a show with mild hearing loss, for anyone that wants to know, is like having less than perfect vision and forgetting to wear glasses; things aren’t as sharp, and it uses extra energy to be able to focus on what’s going on. So yes, there have been times when I have missed some words. Honestly, probably every time when an actor has mumbled or whispered. That’s why I like to get the play text, so I can check and read it before I write the review or the feature, just in case I’ve missed something. Half a photo from Last Rites of Meyappan, a brown man in a white t-shirt and grey jogging bottoms, sat with crossed legs, hands together under his face. Behind him is the shadow of a huge figure, holding something like a staff. Text below reads: Meyappan smiles at that. “The lovely thing for Tayo was for me to say, I’m deaf, I don’t necessarily hear music, but I’m encouraged by the fact I can feel music, and I’d love the audience to feel what I feel. It means that different people, different types of D/deaf people, can hear different elements of things. Some people can hear high pitch, some people can hear the low frequency sounds, some people can hear everything – that's fine, but it’s lovely to be able to feel the show, too.”
February 7, 2025 at 10:39 AM
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For paid subscribers - join us - it's a steal! - but a peek at what lies beneath (photo by Marc Brenner):
Text reads: And Inside No 9 is itself inherently theatrical, with its single locations and confined spaces. (It’s Oulipian too in the way it uses constraints of space – and presumably budget – to inspire formal innovation). You can draw a line between the Play for the Today series of the 1970s, which often produced unsettling gems like Robin Redbreast and Penda’s Fen, with Inside No 9 – and while not all of their 55 episodes would translate seamlessly to the stage, many would (Exeunt even published a piece on this when the first series aired). Several episodes have been explicitly about theatre, most obviously series one’s The Understudy, their backstage Macbeth, but there have also been episodes written in iambic pentameter (Zanzibar, featuring Rory Kinnear on top form as twins, one of whom has a penchant for water sports) and an episode inspired by commedia dell’arte (Wuthering Heist, an underrated banger). The last series of Inside No 9 felt like a meditation on exits and endings. CTRL/ALT/ESC, the escape room episode, turned out to be about parting (or not, depending on how you read it). The Curse of the Ninth was inspired by the superstition that a composer will be fated to die while, or after, writing their ninth symphony. Many people might have been tempted to make that the last episode, but for them it was the penultimate one. A woman in a medical or dentist's chair, surrounded by a man with a gloves and an old-timey magnifying glasses headset on, and woman in old-timey medical garb. They are filmed by a man kneeling before them on the stage, with his footage projected behind them and above, in black and white.
January 31, 2025 at 10:42 AM
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Two tubs of Marshfields ice cream with 'cancelled' and 'controversial' written across them, on red traditional theatre seats A toastie with alphabet soup coming out of it, and the words (Not an Alphabetti toastie but a useful literal visual aid (c) Frankie's Toastie's, Manchester) A can of gin and tonic which says Critic-aid on it
January 10, 2025 at 10:25 AM
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Read, sweat, read - great stuff inside. exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/gonna-make...
Like the members of Pony Cam who all have sporting backgrounds, British performance-maker Jennifer Jackson was really into sport as a kid – her show WRESTLELADSWRESTLE is in part inspired by her experiences as a teenage judo champion – and she has a fascination with feats of endurance. She became interested in fell running and the fact that the people breaking the records in that field were often women in their 40s and 50s. “This really challenged what I thought was possible in terms of athleticism and sportsmanship.” The company of show 'Burnout Paradise' on treadmills, hands aloft, all in white t-shirts and yellow shorts with rainbow lighting The space between the representational and the real has always fascinated me and work like this sits right in the spicy centre of that space. In the UK, so often when watching actors sweating through their costumes, their foreheads gleaming under the stage lights, it can feel like theatre is engaged in a kind of denial of the flesh, a rejection of the messy reality of inhabiting a body. The strain and effort are, if not concealed, then certainly downplayed.
December 17, 2024 at 10:41 AM
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Holly talks to professionals of script reading experience @nanarty.bsky.social, Tamar Saphra and @absentobject.bsky.social. Better pay, opportunities and connections, transparency of the brief: what measures would improve the work of script readers?
A year ago, the Dramaturgs’ Network published their own independent research, calling script readers “highly skilled [but] largely invisible within the industry – and significantly undervalued.” They wanted to shine a spotlight on the fact that readers were often working for “well below the minimum wage” – given that, on average, readers take 2.5 hours to read a script and write up notes. They called for fees of £30 or more per report for London organisations, £25 or more for those outside London. Under such public scrutiny, some venues did put their rates up in line with the recommendations – such as Sheffield Theatres, who now pay £30 per script. Some did not. “It relies on the constant churn of people who are willing to do it for what, if you actually think about it on an hourly basis, is often less than minimum wage,” says Naomi Obeng, a playwright and dramaturg who’s read for several major theatres. “Usually, when you’re valued by a company, you’re paid properly,” adds Obeng. “It’s very easy to feel undervalued, or not valued at all. The people running the processes don’t necessarily understand themselves how much work goes into it. And the feeling is: there will always be more readers. Like there will always be more tenants…” “You know that these are subsidised theatres that have very little budget,” acknowledges Kwa Hawking, who reads for the Royal Court and the RSC, but has recently turned down work elsewhere because of the low rates. “But I think being really detailed about the economics of it would empower people to make the decisions for themselves – to evaluate carefully exactly how much you can afford to do, and what it will afford you in turn.”
December 10, 2024 at 10:41 AM
exeuntmagazine.bsky.social
Featuring @bachrach.bsky.social, @hollywilliams.bsky.social, @bardythoughts.bsky.social, Julia Rank, and Frank Peschier! Full article and an additional free Exeunt article available for £4 per month for a limited time only - less than a drink in most theatres!
Amy Borsuk: For me personally, I don’t necessarily want them in a romantic relationship – but rather to play with their friendship as something that defies traditional categorisation: a love so deep that it is sacrificial, while also being a rivalry, and a friendship built on trust and kindness. There’s an intimacy to their friendship in the show that was lacking a little in the film. Incidentally, this falls into my category of wanting more queer narratives that explore queerness beyond sexual identity alone/having gay couples following het romance tropes to the letter. I do think fear of queerbaiting is key here, but from what I’ve heard the film’s being gleefully embraced by a new generation of queer kids anyway? There was part of me that genuinely wondered if they’d go for a full rewrite – Jon M. Chu also added a lesbian couple into In The Heights – but I think the casting of Mr Bridgerton Jonathan Bailey makes it impossible for that role to end up being so totally sidelined. Frank Peschier: I'm not for a second saying that Nessarose should be well adjusted, it’s a much more interesting and complex role that she isn’t – or that her fellow students aren’t ableist wankers. I'm just not fully sure that it is clear in the narrative that she’s not intended to be pitied? E.g. it’s still Elphaba always ‘rescuing’ her rather than us seeing her have agency.
December 6, 2024 at 10:52 AM
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A peek at what lies inside (and it's one of our free ones!)
and he's coming for you. It's like a festive Children of the Corn situation, the children of Merseyside must be wetted and then egged on in ritualistic dance to ensure the harvest. Picture of a pink, red and grey set as part of Notting Hell at the Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol with two white male actors in it, one lolling on tiny pink steps in his boxers, one upright in chinos and a shirt. Proooooobleeeeeeem? The first time I watch her, it is a revelation. The broken chair, the golden leg, the shock of the salad. It is sometime after midnight at the fringe in a thin, stuffy basement and Julia Masli has us howling as she roams among our tightly packed chairs, demanding we share our troubles so she can fix them. There is an electric feeling of what the fuck is happening, a giddy delight at having squeezed into this sweaty room with tipsy, elated strangers to witness this strange, compassionate parade of problem-solving.
November 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM
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Read the full post here:
exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/on-bringin...
November 19, 2024 at 10:39 AM
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"The critical conversation around theatre is at risk of going quiet, just when we need it the most"

The first issue of Exeunt's brand new substack is out, feat an intro by new editor Holly Williams, and a dialogue on the state of criticism by Natasha Tripney and Alice Saville
November 19, 2024 at 10:33 AM
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We've missed you. But not the bird app. So please do join us here - and sign up to our shiny new Substack to read our words
November 14, 2024 at 11:16 AM