Martin ThomassonThick and Tight’s modus operandi – quirky choreography, hitched to voiceover and lip-synch as well as music – serves up enough treats to bring sunlight into the hearts of those of us braving a bleary February evening in Salford. Humour and charm...
What do soldiers’ wives get up to when their husbands (or wives) are away on active service? Never fear. “Military Wives” is not a News of the World-style exposé. It’s a heart-warming story based on real life events of how a group of women set out...
E. M. Forster’s famous two-word exhortation, “Only Connect” appears onscreen to top and tail writer/director Michael Winterbottom’s latest work, ‘Greed’. You might want to connect the life story of Winterbottom’s egregiously avaricious...
Moses KabungaHow would you spend your last night on earth? Kathy, a 40-something pub landlady, has elected to host a quiz night. There’s no guarantee anyone will attend – but they do. As we take our seats in The Four Horseman pub, a muffled Orwellian radio...
A little space is a delicately ambitious collaboration between production companies Gecko and Mind the Gap. The former explores the use of physical theatre to express motion and emotion, whereas the latter is internationally renowned for championing...
Carmel ThomasonIt’s a cold, dark night on the moors in director, Bryony Shanahan’s new production of Wuthering Heights at The Royal Exchange. Adapting Emily Brontë’s sweeping 19th century novel for the stage is always ambitious, not only because of the scale of...
Steve TimmsIt’s not all about you, Michael – Thriller Live is a fast-paced jukebox affair, bursting with hit after hit. One of the most difficult dilemmas of modern life revolves around the revelation of the ‘dark star’: that is, the discovery that an artist...
There’s a moment in Under the Silver Lake – the third film from director David Robert Mitchell, after the hit horror It Follows – where Sam, the aimless slacker at the heart of this delirious, Los Angeles neo-noir, beats up a pair of teenagers who...
In 1910 a young Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel set sail from England to tour North America with Fred Karno’s music hall troupe. This part of Told by An Idiot’s story is true – strange only because of the stars these young men would later become...
An Act Care is an hour long, imagined chance encounter between Aneurin (Nye) Bevan (played by Seren Vickers) and his realised version of the NHS, 72 years after its inception. Bevan, often regarded as the founder of the NHS, was born in 1897. The...
