
Category: Reviews
Carousel
With its wife-beating antihero and early dramatic climax, it’s no mean feat to make ‘Carousel’ a satisfying experience. Opera North’s revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most operatic musical is richly orchestrated and vibrant – even if it doesn’t capture all of its darker edges. An impressive set featuring a lightbulb-lit … Continue Reading Carousel
My Stepson Stole My Sonic Screwdriver
I should confess at the outset of this review that I am an enormous fan of Doctor Who. If you think it’s trivial, nothing more than a bit of wobbly-walled sci-fi nonsense, you’re wrong. It’s inspired everyone from Mark Gatiss to Neil Gaiman and is at the root of this funny, moving … Continue Reading My Stepson Stole My Sonic Screwdriver
The Revenger’s Tragedy
The engineered cliffhanger that ends the first half of this fast-paced, blackly funny production isn’t followed by a ‘duff duff’, but it could be. This is Jacobean tragedy via ‘EastEnders’ – and it works. Thomas Middleton’s lurid, camp tale of a man’s elaborate revenge on the duke who murdered his … Continue Reading The Revenger’s Tragedy
The Great Gatsby Musical
F Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel about 1920s America continues its 2012 onslaught on the British stage with this musical adaptation. Don’t panic about people singing about hit-and-runs though; it’s handled more subtly than that. But perhaps inevitably, some of the book’s desolate beauty and power is missing. Linnie Reedman has … Continue Reading The Great Gatsby Musical
Jonny and The Baptists
Jonny and The Baptists are the kind of band you wouldn’t mind spending an evening with in the pub – although you’d be wise to avoid any establishment claiming that name if it sells more than beer. As they make clear in a typically witty protest against the advent of … Continue Reading Jonny and The Baptists
Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel
‘Nothing is not giving messages’ reads the sign on the red shelf, in the red room, under the staircase. I am sitting drinking port on a single bed, under the glassy gaze of a tattered teddy bear propped up on a pillow. In front of me, perched on a small … Continue Reading Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel
The Two Worlds of Charlie F
You could argue that this show is critic proof. Woven from the words of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan since 2002, and performed by them alongside professional actors, it has the awful weight of reality behind it. But to grant it special dispensation and to praise it by default, for its … Continue Reading The Two Worlds of Charlie F
Julius Caesar
‘Julius Caesar’ is a harder sell as an outdoor family show than ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, which Principal Theatre Company is staging in Coram’s Fields on alternate days. In response, director Paul Gladwin has put everything in modern dress and upped the comedy quotient. We get football-style chants at Caesar’s … Continue Reading Julius Caesar
The Fear of Breathing
The Finborough is keeping time with real life in this harrowing verbatim piece, knitted together from secret interviews conducted in Syria by journalists Paul Wood and Ruth Sherlock and director Zoe Lafferty. A clamour of voices – including a hotel owner, a radio DJ, a student activist and members of … Continue Reading The Fear of Breathing
Ten Billion
think we’re fucked.” That’s Professor Stephen Emmott’s stark conclusion at the end of Ten Billion, which reveals in fascinating and horrifying ways the true nature of the damage we have inflicted on our climate in the past 300 years. Ten billion is the estimated world population by the end of the century … Continue Reading Ten Billion
The Trojan War and Peace
The Scoop’s sunken amphitheatre is a natural fit for Phil Willmott’s ambitious adaptation of Aeschylus’s ‘Oresteia’ trilogy, the latest in Steam Industry Theatre’s annual series of free outdoor shows. The sequence kicks off with the child-friendly ‘The Trojan Horse’, which makes a song and dance of the siege of Troy … Continue Reading The Trojan War and Peace
Blue Remembered Hills
This adaptation of the 1979 Dennis Potter TV play (which starred Helen Mirren) gives us a childhood haunted by the Second World War and the spectre of adulthood. Storm clouds loom over the blue remembered hills of A.E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad as the actions of a group of seven-year-olds lead … Continue Reading Blue Remembered Hills
Blue Remembered Hills
Interior (Natasha Tripney): A thicket of skeletal trees made from scaffolding poles painted a jarring shade of blue forms the backdrop to Anna Ledwich’s stage adaptation of Dennis Potter’s television play. The cast, playing seven year olds, clamber and scramble across these metal branches; they swing by their arms and drop … Continue Reading Blue Remembered Hills
The Dark Side of Love
Red balloons litter the floor like bloodied, deflated hearts; knives are thrust into stomachs again and again; a couple dance with need and disgust; and we watch like voyeurs. The party is over in this splintered vision of love, staged in the bowels of the Roundhouse as part of the … Continue Reading The Dark Side of Love
Chicken
Mike Batistick’s play about identity crisis among ‘the working poor’ has some sharp lines and could be interesting in the right hands. But this lacklustre production does it no favours. Hard-up Big Mac addict Wendell (Craig Kelly) is struggling to provide for his pregnant wife, Lina, while trying to rid … Continue Reading Chicken
The Last of the Haussmans
Guylinered Nick (Rory Kinnear) has returned to the family home – a dilapidated British seaside pile that stands out like a sore thumb among a rash of achingly tasteful celebrity-owned houses – dragging behind him a barely-kicked drug addiction and a lifetime of resentment. Waiting for him is his sister … Continue Reading The Last of the Haussmans