Category: Reviews

A bit of Gothic drama seems especially fitting on a cold, wintery night and Mark Stratford obligingly delivers with The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which visits the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre as part of a tour running until mid-year. Stratford’s is a neat adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 1886 novella… Continue reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

I f you’ve ever wasted an hour on the phone battling the computer-generated voice of your bank or internet provider, Swamp Motel’s new show will feel horribly familiar. A half-baked dystopian fantasy about data harvesting, it claims to be immersive, site-specific and “cutting-edge”. Reader, it is none of these: it is you, seated in a cubicle in… Continue reading Saint Jude at 100 Petty France review: this half-baked ‘immersive’ dystopian fantasy is hilariously awful

The Good Woman takes us back to 1967 Switzerland where women still don’t have the right to vote in elections and husbands can refuse to allow wives to have a bank account or get a job. Since women are expected to concentrate on their home duties, television broadcasts regular cooking programmes fronted by Bette (Faith McCune),… Continue reading The Good Women

Lemon is a symbol of longevity, purification, love and friendship. Lemon is also a symbol of bitterness and disappointment. But five lemons in a row without a single comma sounds like somebody is swearing. Sam Steiner’s two-hander, originally performed at Warwick Arts Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival in 2015, when the author was 21, is… Continue reading Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons

This 1959 musical, with a dream writing cast for the time of Laurents, Styne and Sondheim, is revived by Ben Occhipinti as the big musical running through the whole of the Pitlochry summer rep season. Based on the memoirs of upmarket stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and set on the burlesque circuit of the 1920s, the… Continue reading Gypsy: A Musical Fable

While Stratford Festival is best known for its reliably watchable Shakespearean productions, the Canadian company is no slouch when it comes to selecting and presenting contemporary plays. The team behind Serving Elizabeth, led by director Kimberley Rampersad, must have faced innumerable problems in bringing this work to the stage, given that it eventually played to a… Continue reading Serving Elizabeth

Exercise might well be good for you, but if you’re cycling on the spot and not getting anywhere, there’s probably a lesson in there. For the cynical reviewer character in Spin Cycles, dually exercising and exorcising with every push at the pedal is both a job and a life choice. It’s a curiously unique spectacle.… Continue reading Spin Cycles

For the longest time, there has existed an air of mystery and fascination with the four Grand Duchesses, daughters of the exiled Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. It was often hypothesised and even warmly romanticised that one or more of the four may have survived in secret, until the confirmation of the DNA… Continue reading OTMA

God Catcher is a musical reworking of the Ovidian version of the Greek myth of Arachne. Eschewing the traditional story of the over-proud weaver of ancient Hypaepa, this instead retells it as the story of a sweet and humble girl, taught to pull the shuttle by her mother and madly entranced by the stories of the… Continue reading God Catcher

There’s a precarious balance between mankind and nature, a fickle and thin line by which the whole of human civilisation resists the endless force of the natural world, which constantly threatens to consume us in our extravagant technological hubris. But when tested by nature in all its greatest majesty, what hope does a lone human… Continue reading Her Green Hell