Theatre and performance in Greater Manchester & other places.
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 8 & 14 May 2018. Up go the lights. Five women doing their own thing. Dancing with a lampshade on their head, stroking a toy dog, playing the piano, conducting an imaginary orchestra or transfixed by a spinning chandelier. We're not in Kansas anymore, but then neither are we in an unnamed [...]
HOME, Manchester. 16 May 2018. "All I did was shoot him in the ass". Angel Cruz lands himself in Rikers Island prison after shooting the Reverend Kim. Although he only shot him in the 'ass', the reverend dies following complications in hospital. Angel is allowed out of his cell for an hour a day to [...]
HOME, Manchester. 10 May 2018. If ever a house was not a home, this is it. An outline of a structure, nothing more than a wooden frame with plastic sheeting for walls. A place both insecure and transparent. Eugene O'Neill's fraught and feuding Tyrone family find shelter within this New England summer house but no [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 24 & 30 April Although Rory Mullarkey's sparkling translation of The Cherry Orchard is quite clearly a labour of love, he has no qualms about describing Chekhov's final play as "weird". It's easy to see what he means. Set in a country house populated by an assortment of odds and sods, a [...]
53two, Manchester. 9 May 2018. "It's just you and them, and the music". Dropping in on three different years, Loop begins in 1965 with a young woman leaving behind her frustrating life in London to start a new one in Manchester. Then, after eavesdropping on two teenagers falling in love in 1985, it all comes [...]
Bolton Octagon at Bolton Town Hall. 26 April 2018. Bolton Octagon's annual REVEAL Festival promises "original and exciting theatre" although it also offers the additional bonus of seeing performances in non-theatre venues across Bolton. So far I've perched on a bar stool to watch a performance in a pub and sat on a row of [...]
Bolton Octagon at the Venue Bar. 25 April 2018. Bolton Octagon's annual REVEAL Festival promises "original and exciting theatre" although it also offers the additional bonus of seeing performances in non-theatre venues across Bolton. So far I've perched on a bar stool to watch a performance in a pub and sat on a row of [...]
Salford Arts Theatre. 20 April 2018. Tim Keogh's Thorn begins with a young man transfixed, and ultimately transformed, by the dazzling sight of David Bowie performing Starman on Top of the Pops. The year is 1973, and that 'boy' is Steven Patrick Morrissey. While for most of his adult life he will choose to be [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 11 & 14 April 2018. A beat. Hear it. Making music, pulsing through the body and marking time. Beats can come together to make something bigger - a song, a crowd, a symphony, a city and a show. Press START Mixtape is a collection of beats, powered by the rhythms of young [...]
Octagon, Bolton. 9 April 2018. Set in Bolton in 1967, there's something reassuringly sweet about Kathrine Smith's tale of two men falling in love for the first time. Yet, Bobby and Ralph's romance follows a far from conventional trajectory - an anonymous fumble in a toilet cubicle, leading to a fiercely uninhibited fuck in Ralph's [...]
Circles & Stalls 