Martin ThomassonThe Bridgewater Hall currently represents the last time great architecture was permitted to plant foot in Manchester (Discuss). It is, in itself, a reason to visit the city – the quiet northern confidence of its burly, open-faced exterior, the...
Being cast alongside Kathryn Hunter can’t be an easy job for an actor. I speak here not of her personality – of which I hear only only positive reports. I refer to Hunter’s remarkable capacity to inhale the air from all four corners of the...
Questions concerning who should be permitted to write about certain topics and, more pointedly, which actors should be allowed to play certain roles have become increasingly vexed in recent times. I don’t wish to poke my finger into wounds that are...
Leos Janacek’s three-act opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, is a peculiar beast – part children’s folk tale, part tragedy, part modestly profound meditation on the cycle of life. It’s a difficult piece to mount successfully, but Opera North’s...
Of the two generations represented in Bill Naughton’s Spring and Port Wine, the older one (the parents) have departed this world and even their children will now be in their eighties. So, much as Boltonians love their adopted son (Naughton moved to...
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly continues to pull the crowds; partly, of course, because of the maestro’s music, but also because it is a simple, truthful story, based (albeit at some creative distance) upon real life events. The entire opera is set at...
I don’t mean to say I’ve lost count, or that I was found, as a babe, at Victoria Station. What I mean to say is that I have not yet found how to be the age I am. I often don’t feel right, ‘in myself,’ as the saying goes. There are, of course...
It does my Christmas spirit no good at all to be writing a less than warm review about a Maxine Peake project. The star of Dinner Ladies, Silk, and the rightly acclaimed post-Hillsborough docudrama, Anne (plus a glittering array of theatrical...
The curtain rises to reveal four young men, each naked but preserving a modicum of dignity by holding a small pile of his own clothing (shoes and all) at a strategic height. These four are the latest inmates, just arrived at Shawshank Maximum...
English National Ballet’s production of Swan Lake is entirely conventional. And perhaps, with such a classic piece, this is what audiences demand – after all, the magnificent sight of ballerinas in white tutus moving in unison is one of...