Martin ThomassonIt’s hard to create new work – sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s brave for theatres to commission new work – sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s hard to review a piece written/devised to honour a dear friend...
You can approach Trajal Harrell’s new work, Maggie the Cat, as a purposeful critique of the politics of race, gender and class, inspired by (note: ‘inspired by’ not ‘based upon’) Tennessee Williams’s classic, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; or you can go in...
Some of the most powerful political drama of the second half of the twentieth century (Athol Fugard’s, Siswe Banzi is Dead and Woza Albert! by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon, to name but two) was written in protest against apartheid...
When Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures company takes on Shakespeare and a classical ballet score by Sergei Prokoviev, we are primed to expect the unexpected. If Bourne is to be believed (and he’s a knight of the realm, so he ain’t gonna lie, is he?)...
I really want you to find your way along to Hope Mill Theatre. It’s a lovely fringe venue, not far from Piccadilly, with a well set out bar area and an accommodating, flexible, audience-friendly theatre space. I also want you to see their latest...
The comedic trope of the domineering father, who needs to learn that times have moved on and the world is no longer his to command, served two Lancashire writers –Bolton’s Bill Naughton and Eccles’s Harold Brighouse – well in the 20th century...
I recently read an article on a contemporary dance forum which argued that narrative dance (that which seeks to tell a story through music and movement) has had its day, and that the future belongs entirely to abstract choreography. I was not...