Theatre and performance in Greater Manchester & other places.
The Arden third year Theatre & Performance students in collaboration with Eggs Collective. 18 October 2018. The Waterside Theatre, Manchester College. It's odd how infrequently television is featured, or even mentioned in passing, in theatre productions, especially considering the big part it plays in so many of our lives. Are You Still Watching asks you [...]
Contact Young Company with Hetain Patel. 30 August 2018. Earlier this year Contact Young Company shone a spotlight on the ongoing struggle for women's rights with She Bangs The Drums. This time they've got their mechanic's overalls on and they're having a good poke around under the bonnet of manhood. After being accompanied to a [...]
Royal Exchange Young Company. 15 August 2018. Closed for the summer, and largely deserted, North Manchester's Abraham Moss School seems an unlikely substitute for the island setting of Shakespeare's The Tempest. There's something happening in the hall, but it's not clear what. Are we being asked our names at the door or is a register [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 20 - 22 July 2018. CO:LAB is the Royal Exchange's annual festival showcasing works-in-progress by "the next generation of North West theatre-makers". The weekend-long event is part of the theatre's Open Exchange talent development programme and it provides local artists with an opportunity to test out their work in front of a [...]
HOME, Manchester. 24 July 2018. Set in a small Nigerian town, Chigozie Obioma’s novel The Fishermen tells the story of four young brothers whose lives are turned upside down following an incident on a fishing trip. Such excursions are forbidden by their parents, but they surreptitiously set off in the hope of catching something from [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 9 & 19 July 2018. After a recent stint on the Royal Exchange's main stage as a spinning Winnie in Sarah Frankcom's production of Happy Days, Maxine Peake is back again, although this time as the writer of Queens of the Coal Age. Taking us deep underground, her play reimagines the true [...]
Altrincham Garrick Playhouse. 14 June 2018. "I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot". Time and Again Theatre company premiered Greyhounds as part of last year's Greater Manchester Fringe Festival. It's now heading to the Edinburgh Fringe in August. In advance of that, Manchester audiences had an [...]
The Carriageworks, Leeds. 22 June 2018. Roy Castleton's play On Behalf of The People begins as the Second World War comes to an end. Set in a Yorkshire mining town it views the early post-war period through the eyes of one local working class family. Soldier Tom Mason gets a hero's welcome from his mother [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 30 May 2018. Staging Samuel Beckett's Happy Days at the Royal Exchange, in the round, poses an obvious challenge - what to do about that "expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound". Director Sarah Frankcom must have been toying with several ideas initially, when tickets first went on sale only [...]
Oldham Coliseum. 25 May 2018. Much has rightly been made of the legacy of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, with its influence on new generations of women writers, the pioneering depiction of working class life and its lingering presence in popular culture. What's less clear is how much the play itself has to say [...]
Circles & Stalls 