Review: Transform*****

Trade secret: sometimes star ratings feel a little arbitrary.

How can you capture the experience of watching Shakespeare with help of a couple of asterisks? More pertinently here, how do you sum up Transform with a star rating? You can’t, it’s impossible, because it is entirely different each night. That’s the beauty of the thing. On the night I went, Tuesday, it felt like a four-star evening. If you go tonight it could be five star, it could be two.

Transform is a new initiative from the Playhouse which explores the different spaces in the building. On Tuesday night, there was a band playing loudly in the restaurant area, a big box that houses a karaoke machine at the top of the stairs and in the reconfigured Courtyard Theatre, a series of different performances.

The first of these was a collection of 21 plays, each lasting about three minutes, by this year’s graduates of the Playhouse’s new writing scheme. Varying quality is to be expected, but as a mass, all were entertaining.

Then there was Mad About The Boy. A piece of new writing which began life in the National Theatre Studio, it’s fairly simple to sum this piece up. A five-star piece of writing, directing and performance, one of the most impressive pieces of work I have seen in that space. Extraordinary.

The shame for you is that it was only there that night. Which is the special thing about Transform – it is full of fleeting moments that might be wonderful, or may be laborious – the only way to know is to go.

To June 18.