Dave PorterIt is hard to imagine anything more stirring than an ill-fated love match torn apart between two warring families set to the backdrop of Prokofiev’s dynamic Dance of the Knights. The sheer power of the score, with its dark, pulsing rhythms and...
Is Lear mad? Or is he driven mad? The genius of Shakespeare is that he leaves this question open for us to decide. Lear may be as ‘mad as the vexed sea’, or it may simply be senescence or the onset of dementia which leads him to rashly cast out...
Think you know Manchester pretty well? It may be time to have a rethink. On hand to help adjust your frame of reference is former journalist Dean Kirby and his walking tours of Angel Meadow. Now a local historian and author, Dean’s tours poke around...
The Fun Home is not all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, sometimes it’s not funny at all, what with marital discord, hidden secrets and suicide to contend with. The reason partly may be because the fun home is short for the funeral home, the family...
If art is a weapon, then the corollary of such a statement is that it is also a weapon which can be used against the artist. Such was the case with Ai Weiwei who was imprisoned by the Chinese authorities for 81 days 15 years ago. He recreates the...
Madcap doesn’t quite convey the orchestrated madness which awaits the audience in this show. Conducted at a breathtakingly frenetic pace, you have to be on your toes to keep up with not just the pace of the action but the array...
There’s a lot of talk of ‘Manchesterism’ at the moment and whether the rest of the country can benefit from it if Andy Burnham gets to become Prime Minister. But there is another side to this branch of economics and it has more to do with the spirit...
‘A country road, a tree’. The setting for Beckett’s play is surely as synonymous with the text as ‘blasted heath’ is with King Lear, and in director Dominic Hill’s assured stage setting looks just as desolate. A spectral tree with the mangled...
‘Is there going to be an earthquake?’, asks new bride Sibyl of husband Elyot as they embark on married life together. ‘Quite possibly,’ he replies. There is, of course, but not quite in the way Sybil expected. The earthquake arrives when Elyot and...
Playwright Laura Wade has performed CPR on a Somerset Maugham play many would think not worth bringing back from the dead. It’s easy to see the attraction of adapting The Constant Wife, with its garrulous talk, witty asides and...