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Alex Jacob

English and Business Graduate. Bylines in The Times, Varsity Newspaper, The Cambridge Student and The Reviews Hub.

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About Me

I'm a London based journalist and theatre critic, who has produced reviews, features, opinion pieces, and essays for a number of different publications, including The Times, Varsity, The Cambridge Student and The Reviews Hub. I previously worked as the Varsity Theatre and Features Editor, which involved editing and commissioning 40+ articles, as well as working closely with a team of sub-editors for two terms. Currently, I work as a freelance theatre reviewer for The Reviews Hub.

Experience

- 2010: Published a theatre review in the Times

- 2017-2021: Wrote for Varsity Newspaper and The Cambridge Student

- 2018-2019: Worked as Senior Features Editor for Varsity (Editing over 50 articles)

- 2019: Interned at The Times

-2022 - now: Working as a freelance Theatre Review at The Reviews Hub.

Get in Touch

Email: alexander.jacob@hotmail.co.uk

My Blog

The Reviews Hub •

Meetings – The Orange Tree Theatre, London

On the surface, Meetings appears to be a play predominantly about two things: meeting and eating.

It’s no coincidence that both words echo in the play’s title, one subsumed within the other. Such duality of meaning is a nod to the dynamics and conflicts which pervade the play: meeting vs eating, the global vs the domestic and progress vs the past. And so, just like its title, this is a play which is deceptively simple, initially appearing to be comfortably confined to the domestic, culinary set
The Reviews Hub •

One Day When We Were Young – Baron’s Court Theatre, London

Art about the World Wars always tends to grapple with the same dilemma: how to represent the breadth of these atrocities – their fundamental scale – in a single work of art. To do so, it would have to somehow capture the universality of war, and its uncompromising effect on men, women and children in all walks of life. And so, to find a way around this dilemma, most writers settle on the same solution: rather than writing an all-encompassing epic, they settle for the idiosyncratic.
The Reviews Hub •

I Found My Horn – The White Bear Theatre, London

The one-man show is, for most actors, an ambitious challenge. It must contend with a number of obstacles which are unique to its performance: the solo actor cannot play off the performance of other cast members, nor can he be prompted by the lines of others. He must own the stage for the duration of the performance, inhabiting multiple characters (sometimes at once). Without feedback from others, rehearsals are akin to practicing a speech in a mirror.

I Found My Horn – the tale of a man who con
The Reviews Hub •

The Lavender Hill Mob – Richmond Theatre, London

The recipe for a classic ‘heist’ comedy invokes a set of ingredients which may sound familiar: the first, is of course, is an outrageously eccentric stratagem, which is, at once, delightfully simplistic and meticulously planned. To this, is added a sprinkle of misfits: a group of unusual criminals, unexpectedly mixed together and with an eclectic selection of skills. A dash of action is added to the mix: the heist unfolds, often with varying degrees of success.
The Reviews Hub •

The Quality of Mercy – The Courtyard Theatre, London

Whenever a writer titles their work after a Shakespearean quote, they are consciously performing an act of allusion: they hope that their audience will recognise familiar words in an unfamiliar context, and bring that meaning to bear on their own work. Numerous authors have gone before writer and performer Edwin Flay in quoting The Bard within their titles: The Fault in Our Stars (John Green), Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), to name but a few. This play,
The Reviews Hub •

The Drought – The King’s Head, London

Nina Atesh’s The Drought is – as its name might suggest – a play about absence. It’s an absence that is immediately both visible and audible on the intimate stage of The King’s Head Theatre, in the form of a minimalistic set, punctuated by the eerie sound of wind blowing through nothingness. It’s an absence that is immediately apparent in the vapid and deliberately shallow dialogue of the Captain and his Steward, who open the play. And it’s an absence that will echo throughout the play as a whol
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‘ To Tweak a Mockingbird’: Aaron Sorkin’s play with a twist

A final word on the differences which make this play stand out - the famous ‘climb inside of his skin
quote’ – now synonymous with Atticus – is, in the novel, evidence of Atticus's unerring commitment
to the ethics of empathy. But its meaning gains a whole new dimension when said by an actor, who
himself must temporarily clothe himself in the ‘skin’ of another, and, in all but the most literal sense,
‘walk’ around it. It’s an eerie interpretation of an iconic line...
Varsity Online •

Understanding Cambridge: A Tale of Two Cities

Midday, Market Square: A student protest ruptures the peaceful tranquillity of normality that has, until now, overtaken the city. Eyes are drawn to smoky, bio-luminescent trails from flares; ears strain carefully to hear the wording of the cries (‘Divest, Disarm, Decolonise!’), and for a few seconds, this city of busy minds, bustling bodies and purposeful endeavours grinds to a halt. People pause, listen and contemplate.

But not quite everyone. A select few look up briefly to locate the source
The Cambridge Student •

The Rwandan Genocide, Brandon Stanton, and why ‘Humans of New York’ is one of the most important pages on social media right now

‘Do you ever read something and have a very clear vision that there’s so much of life about which you know nothing? Are you ever just smacked in the face with your own ignorance and naivete?’

It’s 8:20pm on April 6, 1994. An aeroplane carrying the President of Rwanda is about to be shot down, over its capital city, Kigali: the catalyst for a mass genocide against the minority Tutsi population, which lead to the slaughter of over one million people in 100 days. That was about 5 years before I wa