Dave Porter‘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...
A huge bodhran hangs over the set of Dancing at Lughnasa like some leaden sky settling down on the inhabitants of this village in Donegal. Together with the fiddle it represents freedom from the cares of everyday life, a chance to dance and escape...
It turns out that nostalgia is what it used to be. That’s certainly the case with this show which depicts an imaginary meeting between a triumvirate of comedy – Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse – backstage in a dusty dressing room of a...
What happens when you fail to reach the giddy heights of success as an actor? When a career high translates into a summer season in Blackpool rather than the bright lights of Broadway. That’s the intriguing premise of a play written by Andy Moseley...
In 1945, a week-long series of meetings took place in Manchester which was to change the course of history in Africa. Several of the attendees went on to become presidents of African nations and it has been argued that the Fifth Pan-African...