Oliver Giggins, Author at North West End UK

11May

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Cluedo – King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

An irresistible invitation from Lord Boddy brings the seemingly unconnected Colonel Mustard (played by Wesley Griffith), Miss Scarlett (Michelle Collins), Reverend Green (Tom Babbage), Professor Plum (Daniel Casey), Mrs Peacock (Judith Amsenga) and Mrs White (Etisyai Philip) to a country house one dark and stormy evening. Soon the connections, motives and corpses begin piling up as the mystery and hysteria grows. Who is doing the killing? Was it Miss Scarlett, with the revolver in the dining room, or Professor Plum, with the lead pipe in the library? Despite the familiar name, Cluedo is a new piece of work. That is to say, it's a new British play based on an older American play based on an 1985 American film (staring Tim Curry and Christopher Lloyd), based on a 1949 British board ...

4May

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

A Murder is Announced – King’s Theatre

Based on the 1950 novel by the “Queen of Crime” herself, Agatha Christie, the title refers to the murder being announced ahead of time in a local newspaper in a small village, right down to the minute. Though it could be described as a “Miss Marple Story”, in truth the detective-work is split almost 50/50 between her and local police-officer Inspector Craddock. It's also worth mentioning this isn't one of Christie's fifteen stage adaptations of her own work, this one being written by Leslie Darbon. But being based on one of her novels, it does contain many of the genre staples which have, thanks largely to her, become associated with the genre. These include: a small village setting, a plodding police sergeant (here played by Jog Maher), a corpse on the floor (Luke Rhodri), the suspects...

Singin’ In The Rain – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

29Apr

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Singin’ In The Rain – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

It's 1927. Silent-film star Don Lockwood (Sam Lips) has it all, a wise-cracking best friend Cosmo Brown (Ross McLaren), fans, hit films and the most beautiful actress in town, Lina Lamont (Faye Tozer) on his arm. Then a chance meeting with a aspiring actress Kathy Selden (Charlotte Gooch) forces him to re-evaluate himself, just as the movies become the talkies, and everything must adapt or be left behind. The 1952 MGM classic this was adapted from was directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, and starred Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen. It is perhaps least famous for being the era's equivalent of a jukebox musical, having been conceived around songs written and released almost two decades previously. However, the film quickly eclipsed the songs' ...

7Apr

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Dreamgirls – Edinburgh Playhouse

Effie White (Nicole Raquel Dennis), Lorrell Robinson (Paige Peddie) and Deena Jones (Natalie Kassanga) are the talented young 60s R&B group The Dreamettes. This musical charts their journey to stardom over a ten year period (subtly done through music genre and changes in costumes and wigs, by Suzanne Runciman, Danielle Bryson, Poppy Camden, Natalie Onoufriou, Lee-Ellen Wilson, Maria McLarnon, Olta Citozi, Aimee Harrison and Kirstie Lavin). It's not all singing and dancing though, with their journey including compromise, broken friendships (as seen in their name change from the Dreamettes, to The Dreams, and later Deena Jones and The Dreams) and the inherent issues of trying to make it as a black person in a white-dominated industry, aided and hindered by Dom Hartley-Harris as Curtis Ta...

The Da Vinci Code – King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

6Apr

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

The Da Vinci Code – King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

After the curator of the Louvre is brutally murdered, a series of codes left by his body seem to implicate Professor Robert Langdon (Nigel Harman, from EastEnders, Downton Abbey and Blood Diamond) in the murder. Aided by the dead man's grand-daughter Sophie Neveu (Hannah Rose Caton, The Falling, Last Knights, Wizards vs Aliens) and colleague Sir Leigh Teabing (Danny John-Jules from Red Dwarf and Death in Paradise), they must race across time and North West Europe to solve the riddles hidden across time in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci and beyond, and find the shocking historical secret before it falls into the hand of flagellating monk and his teacher. The success of the best-selling novel this is based on (it has already sold over 100 million copies and been adapted into a film starri...

Tandem Writing Collective – Traverse Theatre

4Apr

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Tandem Writing Collective – Traverse Theatre

Established, run and directed by playwrights, Amy Hawes, Jennifer Adam and Mhairi Quinn, Tandem puts on new scripts by the three writers, performed script in hand here by Debbie Cannon, Vivien Reid, Lucy Goldie, and Calum Barbour, with musical accompaniment by Aaron McGregor (who composed all the music with the exception of one piece) and Lucia Capellaro. In “Divide and Conquer” a mother-in-law and furloughed son-in-law deal with forced cohabitation during a Covid lockdown. In “Tying The Knot” (which is based on some real events), a woman hires an online ancestry website called whoami.com to find out about the family she was adopted from with disturbing results. “Heartbrain” is a monologue about life and leasing with your heart. "Swing 'Till You're Winning” follows an understudy who loc...

The Pirates of Penzance – King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

23Mar

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

The Pirates of Penzance – King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Gilbert and Sullivan Society are back with a production of The Pirates of Penzance, directed by Alan Borthwick and David Lyle and starring Keegan Siebken as Frederic, Lorna Murray as Mabel, Sebastion Davidson as the Pirate King and Colin Povey as Major-General Stanley, the latter being responsible for perhaps the show's most famous aspect, the Major General’s Song (“I am the very model of a modern Major-General”), basically the XIXth century Alphabet Aerobics in terms of tongue-twisting at speed. Fittingly for a comic opera, the show's very title is humorous on several levels. On the one hand, Penzance was a docile seaside resort at the time, and consequently not the place one would expect to encounter pirates in, and on the other, the title worked as a jab at the theatric...

16Mar

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

SIX: The Musical – Festival Theatre

The musical SIX, written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss and directed by Moss and Jamie Armitage, is an 80-minute celebration of 21st-century girl power through the story of the six wives of Henry VIII. In it, Catherine of Aragon (Chloe Hart), Anne Boleyn (Jennifer Caldwell), Jane Seymour (Casey Al-Shaqsy), Anna of Cleves (Aiesha Naomi Pease), Katherine Howard (Jaina Brock-Patel), and Catherine Parr (Alana M Robinson) get to put across their point of view through a glitsy Chicago-esque Cell Block Tango set-up (replace “Pop – Six – Squish – Uh-Uh – Cicero - Lipchitz” with “divorced – beheaded – died – divorced – beheaded – survived). The show first premiered 5 years ago in a hotel conference room at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival performed by half a dozen student actors and has since then re...

The Scent of Roses – Royal Lyceum Edinburgh

10Mar

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Scotland

The Scent of Roses – Royal Lyceum Edinburgh

Scottish playwright and director Zinnie Harris' The Scent of Roses begins with a wife who takes her husband hostage to finally have an honest conversation, locking him into their bedroom for more than a night. But this isn't the whole story. In the five sections which follow we explore the interlocking lives of four pairs of people, each in their separate location, the first scene not so much sparking as giving the audience a way into a chain of conversations, obfuscations and revelations in this circle of connected lives. The constantly reconstituted set designed by Tom Piper is marvellous, starting off angled to contrast the natural shape of the stage and subsequently offering us four to five different locations mostly from the same pieces of wall, floor and slanted ceiling, the last ...

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – King’s Theatre

9Feb

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – King’s Theatre

Direct from London, this Elliott & Harper Productions, Catherine Schreiber and Leeds Playhouse show is an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ classic children's book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, voted the nations favourite book in 2019. It's directed by Michael Fentiman (based on the original production of Sally Cookson) and stars Ammar Duffus, Robyn Sinclair, Shaka Kalokoh and Karise Yansen as Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, four children evacuated from London during the Second World War who find themselves transported to the magical world of Narnia and into the conflict between its ruler Aslan and its usurper, The White Witch (Samantha Womack). With its mix of fantasy and reality (transitioning through the titular wardrobe), this story demands a certain amount of imaginati...