Theatre and performance in Greater Manchester & other places.
Flare Festival at HOME, Manchester. 7 July 2017. By Simon De Winne/Tibaldus as part of Flare International Festival of New Theatre. Out of the darkness, the outline of Simon De Winne dancing comes in to focus. We can hear the effort in his amplified breathing and he moves around the space expansively and with abandon. [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 19th June 2017. Written and Performed by Pauline Mayers. By the Mayers Ensemble 'How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?' Nina Simone. Inspired by those words, Pauline Mayers' What If I Told You challenges us to reflect on our times through her own story. There is to be no [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 16th June 2017. Powder Keg's new work 'Bears' is a carefully calibrated but passionate response to climate change. Taking steps in development to minimise the production's carbon footprint, the set is created from 100% recycled materials, the programme is only available as a download and on the way in the audience are [...]
HOME, Manchester. 9th June 2017. Your phone pings. It's a text. "OK... Make eye contact. Instructions to follow". From now on in you are part of the performance. Even people who've been to immersive theatre previously may not be prepared for what Blast Theory and Hydrocracker have created. It's a sign of how much of [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 1st June 2017. Let's first of all acknowledge how much fun the foam party is and then just move on. That such an orgy of hedonism should occur in a Jane Austen adaptation has left a lot of people frothing at the mouth with excitement. Yet there is so much more to [...]
Contact, Manchester. 24th May 2017. Kes falls in love with Jools and they split up. Kes experiences the joy and pain of a first love. But this is different - Kes was born a girl, and is beginning to identify as a boy. She develops a masculine persona online, meets Jools there and forms a [...]
HOME, Manchester. 19 May 2017. Kieran Hurley's one man show is an incredible rallying cry foretelling the end of the word. Its seeming simplicity hides a complex narrative and a compelling vision. A big table, laden with lights and a control panel. A chair. He takes a seat and puts a match to a candle [...]
Bolton Octagon. 16 May 2017. This is not a review, just some interim (and possibly random) thoughts on 'Winter Hill'. I was lucky enough to be offered a ticket unexpectedly to see it very early in the run. However I'd already booked to see it in the final week so I reserve the right to [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester 11th May 2017 Look - no hands! From this unlikely premise writer Alan Harris draws us in to the story of two lonely people discovering one another through telephone sex line chat. Jimmy works in a drive-through doughnut restaurant and Kitty is a voice at the end of an adult chatline. Beneath [...]
HOME, Manchester 5th May 2017 This review was written for a one-off exercise to the following brief - Write a creative, non-conventional response to Tank. Try pushing yourselves outside your comfort zones and see what happens. Some of this is known. In 1965, Margaret Lovatt lived with a dolphin for 10 weeks as part of [...]
Circles & Stalls 