Review: THE WARP AND THE WEFT at The Glitch

Where: The Glitch, Waterloo

When: 19th September 2025

Stars: 4

The Warp and the Weft isn’t really a play you sit back and watch — it’s one you’re drawn right into. At The Glitch, with just 55 seats wrapped around the stage, there’s nowhere to hide in the dark; you’re part of the fabric as it’s being woven.

Devised and directed by Izzy Ponsford, and performed by Sofia Bellada, Mia Kennerson, Sanna Salán and India Walton, it stitches together myth, memory and history. Stories of weaving women — from suffragette banners to a grandmother’s loom — sit alongside the myth of Arachne, who dared to out-weave the gods, and what makes it lwork is the way the ensemble put those ideas into their bodies. Their movement patterns are something you don’t just see, you feel.

The design helps too. Deborah Piffer’s set and Steffi Aderemi Fashokun’s costumes make everything tactile — you almost catch yourself reaching out to touch the fabric, and Ellie Rowlinson’s lighting and Tom Alford’s sound design and music give the show its pulse: gentle hums, shafts of light, and the odd jolt when things need to turn. It’s a world that can be beautiful one moment and unsettling the next.

Not everything works. The weaving metaphor is rich but sometimes stretched thin, and a couple of sections outstay their welcome when the pace dips here and there. But then the rhythm comes back — in a sudden laugh, a striking image, or a silence that feels heavy in your chest, and those are the moments that remind you why devised theatre can hit in ways a scripted play just can’t.

Part of the point is how it lulls you – the warmth, the comedy, the shared atmosphere… all of it sets you up so the darker shifts cut deeper. It’s a clever trick, and when the ensemble balance that contrast, it really works.

By the end, what sticks isn’t just the stories themselves but the way they’re told — through fabric, sound, bodies and memory, tangled together. It’s it leaves you marked, like threads that cling to your clothes, long after.

The Warp and The Weft plays at The Glitch, Waterloo until 22nd September, and tickets are available here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/vaultcreativearts/1718479.