Month: October 2024

Pantomime’s centuries-long survival is down to its willingness to evolve. Recent years have seen great transformations in the genre, with Evolution Productions’ Jack and the Beanstalk at York Theatre Royal celebrating the very best 21st century pantomime has to offer. Thankfully, passive Princesses are almost extinct from Pantoland today, and indeed writer Paul Hendy dispenses with them completely.… Continue reading Jack and the Beanstalk

In 2019, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) brought three programmes of dance to Sadler’s Wells, now they return with four programmes. Rereading my enthusiastic reviews of 2019, I wonder what more to add—I love the company’s infectious joie de vivre, alluring sensuality, sinuous musicality. If you need uplift, go see… A thirty-minute work from 2022 by… Continue reading Contemporary Voices: Are You In Your Feelings / For Four / Unfold / Revelations

What goes on backstage doesn’t stay backstage in this most riotous—and most British—of stage comedies. Michael Frayn’s inside-out farce may be a little over 40 years old but shows no signs of slowing down in its ability to conjure up a compendium of British comedy. Frayn came up with the idea watching one of his… Continue reading Noises Off

As Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans is performed so rarely, it is a pity that Elisabeth Stöppler’s production, conducted by Vitali Alekseenok, is not staged more conventionally. The whole action takes place in an empty church. There is no pageantry whatsoever and The Maid of Orleans desperately needs spectacle if it is to succeed theatrically.… Continue reading The Maid of Orleans

The latest instalment in HER Productions’ Vignettes features some changes. The venue has moved from Hope Mill to Contact and, more significantly, the plays have a unifying theme: marking the 45th anniversary of the Greater Manchester Rape Crisis (GMRC) centre and being inspired by stories from the centre. As GMRC is a women-led, women-only service,… Continue reading Vignettes

In 2019 the Austrian composer Albin Fries announced he was giving up composing for good, gave away his piano, destroyed most of his CDs and threw out thousands of manuscript pages. It wasn’t the first time he had thrown his pen out of the pram. He did the same thing in 1985, claiming his music… Continue reading Persinette

This two-hander was John McKay’s first produced play, premièred at the Traverse in 1988 with a transfer to the Royal Court. Director Liz Carruthers now gives it a simple thrust staging with a single chair and a screen plastered with images of Margaret Thatcher and posters for The Smiths to remind us it takes place… Continue reading Dead Dad Dog

When a crewmate is lost at sea, as Alys Williams tells us at the outset of this one-woman show, there is a strict protocol to follow. Call “man overboard”. Blow the whistle. Phone the bridge. Point towards the lost soul. And keep pointing. From this simple set of instructions, Williams (debuting as a writer for… Continue reading The Light House

The video is a little fuzzy, the recording of the orchestra rather scratchy. Then the words break through: “Euridice… Euridice… Euridice,” not loud but somehow commanding. The voice is rich, velvety, something to wrap yourself in, that of Janet Baker in her signature role of Orfeo. This was her final operatic engagement, in Peter Hall’s… Continue reading Orfeo ed Euridice

The usual method used when staging autobiographical plays (determining one’s sexuality, reaching a turning point in life) is to perform a monologue. Katherina Radeva on the other hand uses dance to celebrate 40 years as a woman, a migrant and an artist; a particularly daring choice as, although she has always danced, she is not… Continue reading 40/40