Category: Reviews

With the country and indeed the world facing unparalleled problems, many people have been yearning for life as it used to be. The cost-of-living crisis and energy supply issues have meant that families have had to make cutbacks. For some members of society, making ends meet has become a difficult if not impossible task. So… Continue reading Twopence to Cross the Mersey

In the last but one Tory leadership race, Rishi Sunak told a gathering of ordinary Tory members in some countryside constituency that Labour had been putting money into deprived areas and that the Tories were now taking it out of those areas. An academic listening to that supposed Tory achievement wryly commented, “then they are… Continue reading King Hamlin

A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain, Sami Ibrahim’s latest play, is a poetic fable that begins with a young woman in a field shearing a sheep in a surreal land where the heavy fleece of an unsheared sheep doesn’t weigh it down to earth but enables it to float in the air and shit down… Continue reading A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain

After a short tour of its co-producers—and following the sell-out run of The Book Thief, which is a tough act to follow—this new production of Emma Rice’s adaptation of Brief Encounter arrives in Bolton. The original Kneehigh production was a spectacular West End show that toured to big stages, but director Paul Robinson and designer… Continue reading Brief Encounter

The buzz you get from this play is the kind that keeps your mind racing, long after. It’s about life, the universe and everything—but is so much more than that. Writer Lucy Kirkwood made her name with the award-winning Chimerica, later made into a TV series, and has set a standard for turning epic stories… Continue reading Mosquitoes

A retelling of classical Greek mythology is one thing, but a retelling through the eyes of the Gorgon Medusa, notorious for turning anyone into stone with one glance, is guaranteed to put you on the edge of your seat. In this one-woman show, Deborah Pugh takes us on a nerve-tingling romp through the Trojan Wars,… Continue reading Beautiful Evil Things

My Neighbour Totoro was a hit as soon as ticket sales opened, the best sales ever in the history of the Barbican, which shows what affection the 1988 film by Hayao Miyazakiand Studio Ghibli commands. To hand it to Improbable’s Phelim McDermott to direct and to have Joe Hisaishi’s (he is also executive producer) score played… Continue reading My Neighbour Totoro

A church is always an interesting setting for a theatrical production—dependent upon your own relationship with religion, the building can be welcoming or foreboding, comforting or imposing. That duality therefore makes the Victorian pomp of St Nicholas’ in Guildford an appropriately atmospheric setting for Guildford Shakespeare’s latest production, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Making… Continue reading Jekyll & Hyde

James Woolf’s play comes with some anticipation as he picked up one of three Offie Award nominations earlier in the year for Jo and Sam Find Themselves In Woking. Like Joe and Sam, also directed by Katherine Reilly, his The Play With Speeches was first seen at the Hen and Chickens and arrives south of… Continue reading The Play With Speeches

A detective story wrapped up in spooky Halloween garb, Cahoots NI’s seasonally-accented The Ghost House is an immersive treat for younger audiences. Promenaded through the midnight-dark spaces of former shop units in Belfast’s Cityside Retail and Leisure Park, it marks the company’s contribution to this year’s Belfast International Arts Festival and its return to the pop-up venue… Continue reading The Ghost House