Maryam Philpott
Bio: This blog takes a more discursive and in-depth approach to reviewing a range of cultural activities in London, primarily covering theatre, but also exhibitions and film events. Since 2014, I have written for The Reviews Hub as part of the London theatre critic team, professionally reviewing over 800 shows in that time. The Reviews Hub was established in 2007 to review all forms of professional theatre nationwide including Fringe and West End. My background is in social and cultural history and I published a book entitled Air and Sea Power in World War One which examines the experience of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy.
Cultural Capital 
October 4th, 2018 at 12:45 pm
Hello Maryam!
I love Cultural Capital and I especially enjoyed reading your recent review of Anthony and Cleopatra. I would love to have you come along to review our show. My name is Isabelle Schuler, and I am currently producing a gender-bent, glam-rock version of Romeo and Juliet, or in our case Romea and Julian.
It will be at the Bread and Roses from November 6th-10th, at 7:30. Run time is 80 minutes, with a 10 minute interval. I’m sure you’ve got quite a lot of shows to see but we would love to see you or any of your contributors there! Let me know if you’d like to come and which date would suit you best.
Hope to see you there!
Isabelle Schuler
October 4th, 2018 at 3:41 pm
Hi Isabelle – thanks so much for getting in touch and really lovely to hear you’re finding the reviews useful. Its good to know its worthwhile.
Your show does sound really interesting! Here I tend to write about productions I’ve paid to see and have a few others that week, but I also write for The Reviews Hub as a critic so the best thing to do is send the London Editor a message using the online review request form and he’ll check if anyone is free to come along on press night: https://www.thereviewshub.com/requesting-a-review/
I’ll try to come along if I can. If the show is on Twitter then happy to follow – I’m @culturalcap1.
Hope that helps. Thanks again for reading and please do comment on any of the posts if you have any particular thoughts on individual productions.
Kind regards
Maryam
January 15th, 2019 at 3:04 pm
Hi Maryam,
Do you have an email address we may contact you on?
Seatplan
July 13th, 2019 at 7:22 pm
Here at Tower Theatre we’re celebrating the first anniversary of moving into our new home in Stoke Newington and getting ready for launching our exciting new autumn season.
To mark the occasion, we are holding an Open Day and Season Launch on Saturday September 7th when our doors will be open between 11.00am and 4.00pm. As a theatre critic/blogger we’d love to get you a bit more involved in what we do so do pop along at any time and stay as long as you want and if you are part of a team then do please pass this information on to the others.
As well as information about the five plays which we have lined up for later in 2019, there will be activities, tours, information about the Tower’s long history, tastings provided by local food producers and even some pop-up Shakespeare.
We look forward to having the pleasure of your company and showing you all the exciting things we have to offer the world of drama and, of course, we’d love to have you come and review the shows in our forthcoming season. We will contact you about each of these in the very near future but for now here are the key dates for your diary
Autumn Season 2019
Wednesday 25th September- Saturday 5th October
Dead Funny
Terry Johnson
Wednesday 9th – Saturday 19th October
Breaking The Code
by Hugh Whitemore
Wednesday 23rd October – Saturday 2nd November
Blithe Spirit
by Noël Coward
Wednesday 6th – Saturday 16th November
The Beauty Queen Of Leenane
by Martin McDonagh
Wednesday 27th November – Saturday 7th December
Rules For Living
by Sam Holcroft
Notes
The Tower Theatre Company, formed in 1932, is the busiest non-professional theatre company in London
The Tower presents up to 18 full-scale productions a year at its new home in Stoke Newington and has also toured to Cornwall, Paris and Massachusetts regularly
The company has more than 700 members and friends who support Tower activities on a voluntary basis but who pride themselves on their professional standards
http://www.towertheatre.org.uk/
December 15th, 2021 at 8:36 am
I’ve just discovered your blog through your review of Spring Awakening. We saw this production on its first night and were blown away – magnificent. And I don’t really like theatre. Really enjoyed reading your review, you write beautifully and the depth of your knowledge about theatre certainly adds to the experience. I’ve now followed you, and have shared your blog with others. Thank you Julia
December 15th, 2021 at 12:39 pm
Hi Julia – thankyou so much, that’s a really lovely comment to receive. Glad you enjoyed the piece and more importantly the show – it has so much energy and the cast were outstanding.
Hope you find future posts interesting.
Best wishes
Maryam
February 8th, 2022 at 9:46 am
Dear Maryam,
I am getting in touch with you as I am a PhD candidate at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) working on English literature, in particular on newspapers and digital London drama reviews. I have gathered over 40,000 reviews, from 2010 to 2020, and I am examining the discourses produced by two literary communities: that of print newspapers and and that of digital blogs. Data science technology and techniques allow me to modelize the collection and study it on a wide scale, so as to better understand the differences and similarities between the two communities.
My research is not over yet but I have already obtained interesting results. For example, my analyses show that bloggers tend to use the pronoun « I » twice in their reviews, which indicates a subjective discourse. Concerning the locations of the performances, there are twice as many theatres in the digital collection as there are in the print collection, which makes us think bloggers give a more diversified vision of drama culture.
You can access these first results on the following website: https://dramacritiques.com/fr/accueil/ It is a work in progress – concerning both my analyses and the presentation of information – but it should give you an overview of my project. I have also created a search engine from which you can access all the reviews.
I would now like to share my collection with the academic world, so that all students could have access to my data and discover the fringe theatrical culture advertised in the digital reviews. I would like your permission to share your data (name, publishing date, title of the play, the location where it was performed, as well as your review). It would be open access data (not for-profit) and used for academic purposes only.
I am aware data sharing is a sensitive topic nowadays and I am available should you have any concern. I would be very happy to meet you, either in London or via Skype or Zoom, if you had time to tell me more about your vision of British drama.
Best regards
Mylène Maignant
mylene.maignant@ens.psl.eu