Review of A Taste Of Honey at Royal Exchange, Manchester. “Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” At times, director Emma Baggott’s sure-footed revival of A Taste of Honey feels as if it is summoning up the ghosts of Shelagh Delaney’s Salford. In its opening moments, Nishla Smith’s stylish jazz singer [...]
Category: Royal Exchange
Shed: Exploded View
Review of Shed: Exploded View at Royal Exchange Theatre. Partly inspired by Cornelia Parker’s artwork Cold Dark Matter, Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s Bruntwood Prize winning Shed: Exploded View is fragmentary. Like Parker’s dazzling installation, it deconstructs the familiar. Inviting us to view a seemingly random selection of domestic interactions from a different perspective, in a new light. [...]
Brief Encounter
Review of Brief Encounter at Royal Exchange, Manchester. The sound of passing trains may rattle around the auditorium, but a relaxing glow emanates from Milford Junction’s refreshment room. Overhead, designer Rose Revitt’s elegant metal arches and solid station clock set the scene nicely for the Royal Exchange’s new production for Brief Encounter. Polished wooden flooring [...]
Romeo and Juliet
Review of Romeo and Juliet at Royal Exchange, Manchester. Jettisoning fair Verona in favour of somewhere “just beyond Cheetham Hill”, director Nicholai La Barrie relocates Romeo and Juliet, while also bringing Shakespeare’s tale of “star-crossed lovers” bang up to date. High street fashions, Mancunian accents, and youthful swagger offer some reassuringly familiar reference points for [...]
Great Expectations
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 [...]
Beginning
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’ [...]
Betty! A Sort of Musical
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 [...]
Let The Right One In
Review of Let The Right One In at Royal Exchange, Manchester. Tickets for front row seats for Let The Right One In come with the printed warning “risk of blood splatter” - and wherever you sit, the Royal Exchange’s latest show delivers plenty of spills, thrills and shivers. In perhaps its most shocking twist though, [...]
The Glass Menagerie
Review of The Glass Menagerie at Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. The Glass Menagerie was described by Tennessee Williams as a ‘memory play’. Which, as Tom, the play’s narrator explains, means that audiences can expect it to be non-realistic, powered by poetic licence, and a home to “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion”. Such a [...]
Electric Rosary
Review of Electric Rosary at Royal Exchange, Manchester. St Grace’s Convent, the setting for Tim Foley’s new play Electric Rosary, has seen better days. The pleasing symmetry of the chapel’s parquet flooring is now cluttered with cardboard storage boxes, and a bucket sits ready to catch rain drops from the leaking roof. Disrepair isn’t the [...]