Wednesday, April 8

Tag: Amy Conachan

Under Milk Wood – Theatr Clwyd
North West

Under Milk Wood – Theatr Clwyd

For a Welsh theatre marking its 50th anniversary, Under Milk Wood is both an obvious and a risky choice. Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices” is so bound up with its own mythology—its lyrical density, its association with Richard Burton—that any staging must negotiate the tension between fidelity and reinvention. Kate Wasserberg’s production does so with intelligence and flair, even if it occasionally brushes up against the limits of the text itself. Written for radio and first broadcast in 1954, Thomas’s portrait of a day in the fictional Welsh village of Llareggub (read it backwards) remains a defiantly literary work: episodic, associative and rich to the point of saturation. Its comparison to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is not misplaced, but where Wilder offers clarity and restraint, Thom...
Treasure Island – The Lyceum, Edinburgh
Scotland

Treasure Island – The Lyceum, Edinburgh

The Lyceum Christmas show has landed! And in the tradition of Lyceum Christmas shows passed it (thankfully!) takes a wide berth around the ‘panto’ genre and serves up its own idiosyncratic recipe; take a classic tale, give it an Edinburgh flavour, a sprinkling of humour, a seasonal twist, a large dollop of live music and action, and serve it firmly tongue -in-cheek and aimed squarely at the family market. For the most part, Treasure Island, adapted by Orkney based writer, Duncan McLean, achieves its objectives, and the production is hilarious, fast-paced and always wonderfully musical.   In a clever plot twist, we start our tale in a rest home for reformed pirates, no beards, no swashbuckling and absolutely no treasure hunts… Awwww! But old habits are hard to break, timbers req...