RUFUS Hound has no reason to try and impress anyone with his acting, having been one of those who followed in James Corden’s footsteps taking One Man, Two Guvnors on into its West End transfer and on tour around the country, proving, with sold-out shows, that the play was still great without the big name,…
ALAN Bennett’s satirical play People opened at the National Theatre in 2012 and made a short UK tour the following year, to great critical and audience acclaim. It has not been seen since. Winston Leese, founder producer of the Dorset-based Churchill Productions, tried in vain to get performing rights and undaunted, found a way to contact…
BRIAN Friel’s semi-autobiographical play Dancing at Lughnasa and first performed in 1990, is set in County Donegal in 1936 seen from a child’s eyes and from the perspective of that child, grown up, many years later. Writer Michael Evans revisits the harvest festival of Lughnasa when he was a six- year-old boy living with his…
PLAYWRIGHT Caryl Churchill is, according to Wikipedia, “known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.” She is also 78 years old. The only stage direction she gives for her latest work, Escaped Alone, is that the four women who make…
ALMOST 20 years ago, in a hot Edinburgh Assembly Rooms with no air conditioning, a very talented member of the National Youth Music Theatre impressed a small group of us as Mrs Hardcastle, in The Kissing Dance, a musical version of She Stoops to Conquer. A year later, when the same company brought Into The…
MATTHEW Bourne’s newest creation, a dance adaptation of the Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes, itself inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale of the same name, is a triumph. The message of the story is that Art is the greatest force, more important than love and human relationships and, literally, to die for….
THE Concerts in the West voice and piano recital is usually a significant one, and with Clare McCaldin, mezzo, and Libby Burgess, the experienced pianist, we were treated to a very well-constructed programme that mostly worked. For the audience however the necessary concentration was quite a challenge. With a predominantly despairing approach by Gerald Finzi…
THE late Brian Friel has been compared to many of the 20th century’s great playwrights, including Becket and Pinter, but the most accurate comparison, surely, is with Chekhov, and none of his plays more merit the comparison than Dancing At Lughnasa. Like Chekhov, Friel, a prolific writer who died in 2015, had great humanity and…
ABBEY Wright’s production of Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has everything you might want from a 2017 production – colour-and-gender-blind casting, community actors with their many friends and family whooping from the auditorium, full frontal nudity, audience getting splashed with water, “new” music played on unusual instruments, disability inclusion … …
WHEN this multiple-award-winning play, based on the 2003 multiple-award-winning book by Mark Haddon, came to Bath as part of its first national tour in October 2015 it was already sold out when our editor gave it a glowing review, with the few standby and standing tickets selling out for each performance. Fortunately it is back…