Category: Reviews

May be out of my depth here. Lapsed Catholicism and listening to the Today programme may not be sufficient to appreciate a play about the complexities of the situation in Palestine. Hence the twenty-minute delay to the start of the play is spent speed-reading the background information in the programme. The Tremors is a play that rewards preparation. The… Continue reading The Tremors

If asked to picture a musical set in Dublin, you might be forgiven if that evoked an imagined mishmash of Riverdance, pints of the black stuff and Bono. But from those first opening bars, and the penetrating spotlight trained on our protagonist—Guy—Once seeks to disperse your preconceptions. The Barn Theatre itself is an intimate venue… Continue reading Once the Musical

Mrs Doubtfire, the new comedy musical, is the latest in a long line of all-singing, all-dancing versions of classic retro ’80s / ’90s movies filling London theatres from Back to the Future, Dirty Dancing and Groundhog Day. Some are better than others, but if the movie, like in our home, is a firm favourite integrated… Continue reading Mrs Doubtfire

English National Ballet School (ENBS), founded in 1988 by the then ENB artistic director (1984–1990) Peter Schaufuss, with only twelve students as a feeder for the main company, now auditions three hundred every year for thirty places. It has come a long way in thirty-five years. Tonight we see the standard of raw material and… Continue reading English National Ballet School 2023 Summer Performance

The Manchester International Festival (MIF) is an arts festival with a capital ‘A’. There is a tendency to favour works which are extreme or obscure. The attraction for the MIF of Kay Dick’s dystopian They: A Sequence of Unease is clear. Set in an alternate reality / near future in which mobs of philistines systematically roam the… Continue reading They

The première of Nabucco at La Scala in Milan in 1842 was a major turning point in the 28-year-old Giuseppe Verdi’s artistic career. The ensembles are a rallying cry and they had a tremendous political impact during Italy’s struggle for independence over the next 30 years. The slogan “Viva VERDI!” was used as an acronym… Continue reading Nabucco

Peter James is one of the world’s most successful thriller writers. His fictional character Roy Grace, the lead character of his police procedural novels which all contain the word “dead” in their title, is reported to be Queen Camilla’s favourite detective. Over the past decade, James’s novels have been turned into stage plays. They are… Continue reading Picture You Dead

The Yard Theatre finishes its fourteen-year existence in its existing building with a stylistically adventurous production of Tennessee Williams’s memory play The Glass Menagerie. Tom (Tom Varey), standing to one side of the stage, tells us he is taking us back to “the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school… Continue reading The Glass Menagerie

In the midst of preparing for the inevitable exclusion from the list of multi-year funded organisations, Dogstar have found themselves producing a text that similarly has suffered a cull, as The Testament of Gideon Mack from next year onwards will no longer be part of the National 5 English curriculum. Taking the opportunity to tour… Continue reading The Testament of Gideon Mack

A humanoid figure with a donkey’s head lies on a hospital bed in a small, clean room. A book of Shakespeare sonnets lies on his chest. As the dawn rises, we see this elderly man’s day begin: nurses and doctors come to check on him, offering food and assessing his condition. Family members visit, bringing… Continue reading What Dreams May Come