Oldham Archives - North West End UK

A sell-out opening night for A Skull in Connemara at the Lyceum Theatre in Oldham, (the second play in The Leenane Trilogy). The Lyceum proved to be the perfect setting for Martin McDonagh’s work, which centres on the gravedigger Mick Dowd, as the audience had to descend to this atmospheric, below-ground, jewel of a theatre. Immediately the audience were presented with Peter Fitton’s inspired split stage set design: on the one side Mick Dowd’s humble home and the other, the graveyard outside the church. The front row of the audience were mere feet away from the stage and could clearly see the superb attention to detail achieved by the talented set construction team. The lighting design by Bob Critchley was effective in differentiating the two different settings, keeping the audience clearl...

There are a lot of people who would shiver significantly at the thought of a dash up to Oldham (or Owdham to us natives) on a soggy cold Monday night. As a daughter of that fair mill town, I was more than happy to abandon my South Manchester residence and head up t’ th’ills to see the Lyceum’s current production of Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes. Written in the first decade of the 20th Century and just prior to the First World War, this beautifully comic play, which presented one of the first powerful working- class female protagonists, was controversial, shocking and highly contentious amongst both audiences and academics when first produced. Fanny Hawthorn, spirited mill worker and a lass who knows her own mind, spends an illicit weekend away with the boss’s son, who happens to be...

Tag: Oldham

A Skull in Connemara – Lyceum Theatre, Oldham

Hindle Wakes – Lyceum Theatre Oldham