Eva Scott Archives - North West End UK

5Oct

By Peter KinnockNo Comments

West Midlands

Wonderboy – Wolverhampton Grand

With the astoundingly talented and acclaimed Sally Cookson at the helm and a script by Ross Willis, Wonderboy exploded out of the Bristol Old Vic back in 2022 and recently embarked on a national tour already nabbing the Writer’s Guild Award for Best Play 2023. It’s a hotly anticipated ticket with a huge reputation behind it. But many shows with a tidal wave of hype rarely live up to the noise - will this one? Captain Chatter is the comic book superhero who helps our own hero, reclusive Sonny, with his self-conscious stammer which constrains him from making small talk, sharing thoughts and ideas and most of all speaking to an audience. And then he finds himself cast in the school production of Hamlet! 90 minutes whizzes by and for all those minutes the teenage audience (the demographi...

Work It Out – HOME Mcr

“Five, six, seven, eight - step right, swimming motion, move like Jagger, turn and again!” Exercise is good for us. We all know that. It is beneficial not just because it helps to shed a few pounds, it also gives a much-needed boost to our mental health. Progress over perfection is the key to success. Writer Eve Steele has produced a play so full of heart you can hear it pounding like the ticker of an unfit beginner at their first exercise class. This finely judged play is polemical when it needs to be, veers on the right side of sentimentality and brings together a wonderfully disparate group of characters. Together they become their own little mini community. They all have their problems including drug addiction, alcoholism, hoarding and overeating. Damaged and defeated they com...

Decades: Stories From The City 1990s/2010s/2020s – Leeds Playhouse

There is always a hum in any theatre before the lights go down, but tonight as creatives and an audience make that unique communion after months apart it feels like the air of expectation is off the scale as we uncomfortably sit in our masks. Typically, the Playhouse have not made it easy for themselves by offering returning theatre lovers six monologues that attempt to meld events from the seventies right through to lockdown with a potted social history of Leeds For me monologues are biggest of all challenge for the writers, performers and this audience who are just relived to be sat in a dark space at last. It is like stand up with a script as there is no place to go if goes wrong, no-one to bounce off and if the writing is even marginally off it can be torture for all concer...