Category: Reviews

Fans of the popular television show Murder She Wrote will love this hilarious interactive production featuring a 1985 classic episode of Sing a Song of Murder where Jessica Fletcher arrives in London and becomes embroiled in a new murder mystery. Our convivial Australian host ,Tim Benzie, dressed in a grey tracksuit and a grey wig, guides us through this… Continue reading Solve Along A Murder She Wrote

Holly and Brooke have been Hooked on each other since university and have decided to renew their vows to be BFFs forever! The vows, very loosely based on a student code-of-conduct, form the through-line for their off-the-wall sketches. Featuring surreal stories of love, infidelity and kitchen appliances, Hooked: Mr Sister is a manic hour of… Continue reading Hooked: Mr Sister

Theatrical horror is a difficult beast to master, especially at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Too easily, the constraints of a stage performance can pull the macabre into mundanity and the trappings of fear into farce. It requires thought, ingenuity, and subtlety. All aspects that are keenly true when looking at the classic stories of M… Continue reading Casting the Runes

At least a hundred Internets ago, Samuel Johnson famously wrote: “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But Eleanor Hill’s savage exploration of self-loathing in the Instagram age shows that the same is true now as then for anyone, regardless of gender. So what does a… Continue reading Sad-Vents

When a pair of chalk and cheese pirates are marooned on a small desert island, they can only hope to be rescued, or to find treasure that might assuage their plight. But this might be hampered slightly when they are both slightly daft, and talk almost entirely in rhyming couplets. The Wreck of the Queen… Continue reading The Wreck of the Queen Thomasina

Cruise was one of the first plays to be staged as theatreland timidly emerged from lockdown in 2021. The appeal at such a fraught time is obvious, with just two people on stage social distancing is easy to achieve. There is also a topical aspect—as the world comes to terms with the end of a health… Continue reading Cruise

Writer Ellen Brammar and co-directors Luke Skilbeck and Paul Smith have created something of a cartoon from new play Modest. It is all caricature, camp and cabaret hung on events from real-life Victorian artist Elizabeth Thompson’s career to highlight the ongoing struggle for equality. Elizabeth Thompson is a painter you have probably never heard of,… Continue reading Modest

Wonderful to see a packed theatre buzzing with anticipation. The lights dim, evocative music begins, then blackout! Eight actors enter, and so the journey begins and it is a journey. Dad, played by Trevor Fox, returns to his childhood home and finds himself beside the old Sussex farmhouse pond where he used to play. He… Continue reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Apart from Parliamentarians, who must be wide-eyed innocents, most people responded to the revelation Boris Johnson told lies with a weary, “well, duh”. One cannot help but worry the same cynical response might be provoked by Emily Hunter’s play Enough which examines the culture of misogyny, sexism and predatory behaviour towards members of the public and female… Continue reading Enough

Never before had Bryn Terfel sung a role in Russian, let alone tackle the greatest in that country’s great history of opera. Yet this magnificent performance in 2016, which he repeated three years later, ranks for me as the very best available on DVD or to stream, beating even that of the great Rene Papp… Continue reading Boris Godunov