If Pam Adams, author of best-selling children’s book ‘There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly’, was still alive, she would have been 100-years-old this year. Adams lived to be a real old lady, aged 91, and her stories have proved timeless. Based...
Hansel and Gretel is the well-known classic fairy tale of two children who get lost in a wood and take refuge in a cottage where all is not quite as it first appears. Here, kids are still centre stage in the narrative. But for anyone expecting to...
‘Oh, that’s like me!’ Playwright, Henry Filloux-Bennett, now Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield, talks about his previous life as a chef and his inspiration and determination to bring Nigel Slater’s...
If you remember the 2014 controversy regarding certain Birmingham schools and the so-called ‘Trojan horse’ revelations, you most probably recall it as a conspiracy by certain Muslim governors to take over and radicalise British schools, a conspiracy...
Flo, the most junior of doctors, wearing her scrubs, already weary, stressed, overloaded with information and feeling out of her depth, excluded from case conferences by her white-coated seniors, is in need of a night’s rest, to take it all in, to...
“I hope you have not become robots but humanised” (or in Cocteau’s native tongue “J’espère que vous n’êtes pas devenu des robots mais humanisé”) comes the call from the grave. This was Jean Cocteau’s message filmed in 1962 – a...
It has been called Shakespeare’s problematic comedy and, even if the only information you had about it was the title, it’s not hard to see why. The idea of calling a woman a shrew is bad enough, without adding the idea of taming her into the story...
The Thunder Girls is a new show, premiering at The Lowry, that sold-out way before its opening night. It is inspired by Melanie Blake’s book of the same name, of which the action in the play is just a small taster. The novel follows the fortunes of...
‘Fringe theatre’ is a nebulous term that most people will be familiar with but perhaps struggle to define. Usually it conjures up images of a group of ex drama students, gamely staging a piece of new writing – on a zero budget – in a pub back-room...
Shakespeare’s play ‘As You Like It’ ends with the wedding of four couples, including Rosalind and Orlando, with the ceremony overseen by the God of Marriage, Hymen. But how do you go about depicting a god onstage? The answer for the Royal...
Carmel Thomason
Gemma Finkill
Martin Thomasson
Moses Kabunga
Steve Timms