REVIEWS Archives - Page 6 of 588

21May

By Paul WilcoxNo Comments

North West

Even These Things – Royal Exchange

Anniversaries are the central plank of this season at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, with both the celebration of 50 years since the theatre was established and three decades since June 1996, when the explosion of the largest bomb in mainland Britain since WWII devastated the heart of the city centre. The latter is commemorated with Even These Things, a new piece of writing by Irish Mancunian Rory Mullarkey which seeks to place the bombing within the cultural identity of Manchester’s history and explain its part in the renaissance of the modern city. As with the city it celebrates, Even These Things is a complex creation: beautiful in individual parts, but one that does not always work together as a cohesive whole. The play comprises three acts — 110 minutes without an interval — spa...

21May

By Stephanie WiswallNo Comments

North West

Sunny Afternoon – Liverpool Empire

Sunny Afternoon captures the spirit of The Kinks with grit, energy, and undeniable heart, delivering a musical that feels both raw and deeply human. Rather than presenting a polished version of the band’s rise to fame, the production leans into the tensions, frustrations, and contradictions that shaped the music, giving the show an authenticity that resonates throughout, directed by Edward Hall. What makes the musical particularly effective is how closely the songs reflect real life. Tracks such as “Waterloo Sunset,” “Days,” and “You Really Got Me” emerge naturally from the emotional struggles of Ray Davies and Dave Davies, revealing the loneliness, ambition, and family conflict beneath the swagger of the 1960s rock scene. There is something wonderfully unvarnished about the production ...

20May

By Nazaret RaneaNo Comments

Scotland

The Bodyguard – Edinburgh Playhouse

I must admit I went into this musical differently to most people around me because, somehow, I’ve never actually seen the film. Which almost felt embarrassing once the audience started reacting to certain moments with anticipation usually reserved for cult classics. Still, there was something nice about experiencing the story without constantly comparing it to the film version. It meant I could just take the show as it was: glossy, dramatic, a little ridiculous at times, but undeniably entertaining. The production wastes no time throwing you into the spectacle of it all. One minute Edinburgh’s Playhouse is settling, the next there’s a gunshot and suddenly we’re in full concert territory with pyrotechnics, dancers and Queen of the Night blasting through the theatre. It sets the tone ...

18May

By Dylan MooneyNo Comments

Scotland

The Freshwater Five – Traverse Theatre

From the Isle of Wight, theatre company Deadman, have embarked on a national tour of The Freshwater Five, a true story very close to home. Directed by the company’s artistic director, Samuel Bossman, and written by Liam Patrick Harrison, this play aims to spread light on miscarriage of justice and community. Inspired by the real events, the play focuses on 2011 where five fishermen from Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, were accused and jailed for conspiring to import £53m worth of cocaine onto the island. In 2021, new evidence was found that hoped to free the men who were collectively jailed for a total of 104 years. The Freshwater Five is a deep analysis into this evidence and recounts what led up to the events. This play has an intriguing premise - a genuine local story told by cr...

18May

By Charlotte MansfieldNo Comments

London

Stage Kiss – Hampstead Theatre

Currently in its UK debut at Hampstead Theatre, Stage Kiss explores the nature of acting and the intimacy of a kiss, asking where are the lines between reality and performance, and what would the fallout be if those lines began to blur? In Sarah Bruhl’s critically acclaimed romantic comedy, an actress returning to work after a long break finds her ex has been cast opposite her in a revival of a terrible 1930s play, The Last Kiss, where the plot makes no sense and half the characters are called Millicent. Life begins to mirror art as the leads fall back in love, just like the characters they portray, causing upheaval in their normal lives. But is the romance sustainable once the play they’re in has ended? As the reality of being poor and out of work sets in, they are cast in a second ter...

18May

By Paul AckroydNo Comments

London

Player – Riverside Studios

Actors like nothing more than talking about themselves and their profession, and this wonderful little play at Riverside Studios, written by Matthew Lyon, is an ode to the joys but mainly pains of trying to make a career in the theatre. It is almost all written in rhyming couplets in a faux Shakespearean style, which makes it a delight to listen to. Lyon himself plays the actor struggling through the various stages of life in the theatre from initial stirrings of interest at school and home, not always encouraged, through the agony of endless auditions until at last reaching the zenith of actually having a script for the part of “seventh spear carrier on the left”. Ola Forman plays all the other pa...

Mother Courage and Her Children – Shakespeare’s Globe

18May

By Charlotte MansfieldNo Comments

London

Mother Courage and Her Children – Shakespeare’s Globe

Brecht without being Brechtian, Mother Courage at the Globe is an array of sound and colour that departs from the play's theatrical roots. Brecht's classic play about the effect of war was written in response to the rise of Nazi Germany, set centuries earlier, to create distance so that the audience could observe the events without connecting to them. Anna Jordan's translation brings the play into the modern era, referencing drones and missiles, the distance instead achieved by changing the names of countries to colours. We see Blue soldiers fighting Purple ones, with the Orange revolutionaries rebelling against both. In the midst of this is Mother Courage, played by the Globe’s Artistic Director Michelle Terry. She is a war profiteer. Beginning the play with three children and...

18May

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Guys and Dolls – Festival Theatre

Southern Light’s Guys and Dolls arrives at the Festival Theatre with all the confidence and swagger of a Broadway classic that knows it has survived generations. Frank Loesser’s score still sparkles, Damon Runyon’s world of gamblers and hustlers still charms, and Southern Light throw absolutely everything they have at it. This is a huge production, packed with colour, movement and musical ambition, with a cast of around seventy determined to fill one of Scotland’s biggest auditoriums. And for long stretches, they succeed. Directed by Andy Johnston, with musical direction by Fraser Hume and choreography by Janice Bruce, the production understands that Guys and Dolls lives or dies on energy. The Festival Theatre stage is enormous and unforgiving, capable of swallowing le...

15May

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

Visite – Coronet Theatre

This is the second time I’ve come across the work of physical theatre company Teatro dei Gordi. The first was Pandora, a production set in a public bathroom so funny, strange and precise that I spent months recommending it to people afterwards. I was looking forward to seeing what they would do next. Visite did not disappoint. Teatro dei Gordi makes theatre that reminds you we speak in many ways. Words are only one of them. There is also movement, rhythm. In Visite, the company turns its attention to time: how it shapes friendships, bodies, habits, and the way joy and grief slowly accumulate inside a life. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the story of Philemon and Baucis, the piece follows a group of friends from young adulthood into old age, tracing decades of shared life with r...

Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil – Royal Lyceum Theatre

15May

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil – Royal Lyceum Theatre

You could attend Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil at the Lyceum for Ricky Ross alone and leave entirely satisfied. Fortunately, this exquisitely produced new work gives us much more besides. Part gig theatre, part football odyssey, part meditation on grief and belonging, this is one of those deeply Scottish productions that somehow becomes universal precisely because it is so rooted in place. Cowdenbeath may be the setting, but emotionally this could be any town we have tried to escape and yet remain permanently tethered to. Adapted by Gary McNair from Ron Ferguson’s original story, the play follows Sally, played quite brilliantly, with warmth, intelligence and emotional precision by Dawn Steele. After leaving Cowdenbeath behind to build a new life in London as a solicito...