Martin ThomassonBefore I try to explain my regret that Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story was not the original, with Robert Wise’s 1961 version as the 2021 remake, I ought to declare an interest. West Side Story was the first film my mum took me to see. Early in...
I’d be absolutely useless in hell. I’d slide straight into a bottomless mood, and spend the rest of time and a day moping and feeling sorry for myself. As many a ballad will tell you, the point of being in hell, or encountering the devil in any...
In the early 1980s, Liverpool Playhouse staged what was billed as a ‘Marxist interpretation’ of Macbeth. Patrons soon discovered that, for this production, ‘Marx’ signified Groucho, Harpo and Chico. Purists were aghast. We students thought it was...
Opera North, in collaboration with Phoenix Dance, bring us a triple bill: two parts Bernstein with a new piece (“Halfway and Beyond”) based on a contemporary poem, sandwiched between. The evening opens with a revival of Matthew Eberhardt’s 2017...
Jeremy Sams, adapter and director of this stage version of the popular 1970s sitcom The Good Life, points out how current the central clash of ideas seems to be. On the one hand, we have careerist Gerry (played here by Dominic Rowan) and his...
My dear friend, the playwright, Les Smith, once told me, the first draft of a script is to show you that you have a story (beginning, middle and end). The second draft is to find out what your story is really about. Les didn’t, at that point...
The Play That Went Wrong is a relentlessly inventive, immaculately choreographed farce. For the first time ever, I have to begin a review with a health warning: please don’t try drinking white spirit, and don’t (for a joke) put it in anybody else’s...
I couldn’t swear that the The Patience of Trees is the best thing at this year’s Manchester International Festival; I haven’t seen everything on offer. But, as an event, it has that necessary sprinkling of magic that will make it the experience I...
It is a not-quite-paradox of human life that we are all the same and yet each is so unique. One way or another, these two facts underpin all of human joy and suffering. Take, for example, grief: so universal an experience for humanity, yet so...
I always feel obliged to stick around for post-show Q and A sessions. Perhaps, just maybe, one or other member of a creative team, will release some precious nugget into the stream of consciousness triggered by the host’s (or the audience’s)...