Theatre and performance in Greater Manchester & other places.
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 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 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, [...]
Review of Road at Oldham Coliseum. Road, Jim Cartwright’s scabrous slice of 1980s Lancashire life still has the power to knock you sideways. It comes on strong with promises of a riotous night out, all good times and laughs. Only to repeatedly dissolve into the dark dead ends of Thatcher’s Britain – no jobs, no [...]
Review of Things That Divide Us at 53two, Manchester. 53two opened the doors to its new home on Watson Street over a year ago. Although the performance space has played host to an increasing number of shows, I was starting to worry that the pressures of managing a building and keeping it afloat financially had [...]
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 [...]
Review of Habibti Driver at Bolton Octagon. It’s fitting that Shamia Chalabi and Sarah Henley include an Arabic term of endearment in the title of their new play, because love and affection are the bedrocks of comedy drama Habibti Driver. Taxi driver Ashraf often refers to daughter Shazia as his ‘habibti’, although their relationship is [...]
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Theatre and performance in Greater Manchester & other places.
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Theatre and performance reviews in the Greater Manchester area
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