Month: April 2023

You don’t have to look very hard to find a regeneration area in London. We see some of them in the film footage projected onto a back-screen in Chickenshed’s Rush, a musical journey through the lives of three women victims of Britain’s pursuit of wealth. Houses are being demolished and flash new blocks are being… Continue reading Rush

Prime—would does that word mean—in the prime of life, prime numbers? In Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer-nominated 2014 play, made into a sci-fi film in 2017, it’s about mortality, old age, memory, and what remains of us when we’re gone. And AI, artificial intelligence—AI avatars called Primes, who are recreations of our dear departed. It couldn’t be… Continue reading Marjorie Prime

Actor Ian Hallard’s debut play as a dramatist takes its title from an ABBA song and ABBA are its inspiration, but you don’t have to be an ABBA aficionado to enjoy it, though fans will get an extra fillip from recognising song references and arcane information about the Scandinavian foursome. Back in the day, schoolboys… Continue reading The Way Old Friends Do

Staging the most spectacular of Italian operas is a logistical challenge for any company, as Verdi himself discovered when his scenery for the Cairo première remained stuck in Paris for months. Dnipro Opera’s immediate problem for its Cheltenham performance was not quite on the same scale, but the lorry carrying all the scenery arrived just… Continue reading Aida

First seen in 1999 with several later stagings, Zinnie Harris’s award-winnng play now gets a stylish in-the-round revival at the Young Vic. Though drawing on the dramatist’s family history on Pitcairn, it is the fictional story of remote islanders who find their traditional life confronted first by capitalist development and then by life in the… Continue reading Further than the Furthest Thing

America’s brutal war against Vietnam killed, according to many estimates, over a million people. It left many more people deeply traumatised. Richard Vergette’s sensitive seventy-minute monologue as the troubled American ex-marine Jimmy Vandenburg who fought in Vietnam takes us through much of his life story. Set in the auto repair shop Jimmy runs in the… Continue reading Leaving Vietnam

Many words have already been written about J B Priestley’s stage thriller An Inspector Calls, now approaching the 80th anniversary of its first performance in 1945 in Moscow. And these words aren’t just by the critics over the years but by thousands of GCSE students, given the play’s longstanding appearance on the National Curriculum. Coachloads… Continue reading An Inspector Calls