The Arts Review​

Philippa Dunne, Ayesha Antoine, Stephen Brennan, Kae Alexander and Rowan Finken in Eureka Day. Photograph: Helen Murray **** To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, but never all of the people all of the time. Not that the board of California’s Eureka Day Private School don’t try. Woke inclusivity, cultural sensitivity, social justice and a host of appropriate hashtags you never even knew about are

Eimear Barr and Clodagh Mooney-Duggan in In Vitro. Image, Al Craig *** Mark Twain claimed you should never let truth get in the way of a good story. When it comes to Aoife O'Connor's intriguing In Vitro , it's sound advice. Only the advice isn’t heeded. Its eagerness to share truths about the pressures of surrogacy undermining, and undermined by, O’Connor’s far more effecting story. That of a troubled couple, Sam and Lily, together two years, living together one, thinking of

Amber Norelai (Sharp Ears) in INO's The Cunning Little Vixen. Image, Ruth Medjber *** From Aesop’s Fables to Watership Down , anthropomorphic allegories continue to enjoy universal appeal. A big word to describe little stories in which animals display human characteristics. Usually with a moral, and frequently with a dark side. If Beatrix Potter, Wind in the Willows and Walt Disney sanitised nature’s blood torn bodies, Leoš Janáček ’s 1924 opera The Cunning Little Vixen r