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...
For people of a certain vintage (your reviewer, for one), Brookside holds a special place in their heart. So it’s apt that the new production of Two at Shakespeare North should feature two of the show’s stars, Michael Starke (Sinbad) and Sarah White...
Alan Turing broke the enigma code and played a central part in making sure the Germans did not win the war. But he could not win his own war and to others remained an enigma throughout his entire life. Why did he tell police about his homosexual...
How does a person end up sleeping rough in a hostel and spending their days camped out on a park bench asking strangers for loose change in exchange for a swift rendition of Danny Boy? More specifically, how does a woman fall so much lower rather...
Dave Porter