Theatre and performance in Greater Manchester & other places.
Review of Great Expectations at Royal Exchange, Manchester. Rather than the mist and fog of the Kent marshes, Tanika Gupta’s adaptation of Great Expectations is cloaked in swirling clouds of incense. On stage, the Goddess Lakshmi nestles in a reed bed, and the Wheel of Dharma radiates out from beneath the layers of Rosa Maggiora’s [...]
Review of Lizzie at Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester. Lizzie Borden’s home is no ordinary place. There is no fairy twirling inside the music box that can be glimpsed in the show’s opening moments – just an axe slowly revolving. Tensions abound, with family members living in separate parts of the home, a lock on every [...]
Review of This Town at Contact Theatre, Manchester. With its alleyways, cobbled streets, chippies, and pubs – Rory Aaron’s This Town could be one of many places in post-industrial northern England. Take your pick from “the far-off towns that nobody’s heard of”. Aaron succinctly sets the scene, while also referencing the ghosts of the past [...]
Review of Animal at Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester. David is a 25 year old gay man with a lot of sexual urges – he also has a wheelchair and round-the-clock care support. David’s domestic set up doesn’t exactly lend itself to spontaneous casual encounters. When flatmate Jill isn’t around, care assistant Derek is on hand [...]
Review of Too Much World At Once at HOME, Manchester. At the heart of Too Much World At Once is a family struggling to communicate with one another, in a world edging ever closer to catastrophe. It is Noble’s fifteenth birthday, and he’s wrestling with his feelings. He is missing his older sister Cleo who [...]
Review of Song From Far Away at HOME, Manchester. Willem, a financial trader in New York, has his working day interrupted by a voicemail. It's his mother, telling him that his brother Pauli had died. After complaining that the news has come at “a very inconvenient time”, he packs his bags, boards a flight, and [...]
Review of Beginning at Royal Exchange, Manchester. Laura and Danny lock eyes across the room at a house party, and when the last guests have all left, there they are. Just the two of them – with all the empty bottles, plates of leftovers, and a fresh cigarette burn on the carpet. David Eldridge’s ‘Beginning’ [...]
Review of Spring and Port Wine at Bolton Octagon. It is 1966, and The Who’s ‘My Generation’ rocks out rebelliously in the opening moments of Bolton Octagon’s production of ‘Spring and Port Wine’. On stage, the Crompton’s tidy and ordered traditional family home speaks of an earlier era - there’s a cloth on the table [...]
Review of Betty! A sort of Musical at Royal Exchange, Manchester. Meredith Ankle (Maxine Peake) has a plan to ensure The Dewsbury Players will be the talk of the West Riding. Determined not to be outdone by their Batley-based rivals’ upcoming production of Frozen on roller skates, her amateur-dramatics group are developing a production that [...]
Review of A Christmas Carol at Bolton Octagon. Kate Ferguson and Susannah Pearse, the writing team behind Bolton Octagon’s new musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol, have already been confirmed as the creators of the theatre’s 2023 festive offering (Around the World in Eighty Days). Quite a vote of confidence, considering that their latest show [...]
Circles & Stalls 