Writer: Oscar Wilde Adapter: Jon Boustead Director: Paul Birch Composer: Pat Burbridge The Selfish Giant at Friargate Theatre in York offers a charming and engaging reimagining of Oscar Wilde’s classic story for young audiences. The play is based on a story written over two hundred years ago by the famous writer, Oscar Wilde. In the original tale, a Giant has a wonderful garden which children love to play in. The garden is a bit like the Giant’s own heart and, because he is selfish, he builds a wall to keep the children out. The children are very sad. When the…
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Writer: Jessica Swale Director: Bryony Shanahan Having won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2016, Jessica Swale’s witty and raucous Nell Gwynn is long overdue a trip to the North West. Having already sent audiences into raptures at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake and Prescot’s Shakespeare North, will this tri-company production sit well in Chester’s Grosvenor Park? Short answer – very much so. Nell Gwynn makes a fantastic finale to Storyhouse in the Park’s 2026 season. Naturally, as the title suggests, we follow the story of Nell Gwynn, famed for being the mistress of King Charles II -…
Writer: Anton Chekhov Director: Stijn Van Opstal Adaptation: Stijn Van Opstal, Scarlet Tummers, Tom Dewispelaere, Francis Geeraert Anyone who has written descriptive captions for theatre or film will recognise what Belgian company Olympique Dramatique are doing with the title of [seagull]. Within the world of captioning, those familiar square brackets distinguish sounds and other auditory cues that exist outside the spoken word: elements a captioner must explicitly label because they cannot be heard. Directed by Stijn Van Opstal, this version of Chekhov’s play is performed by deaf and hearing actors together. It opens entirely in Flemish Sign Language. The characters…
During the lockdown summer of 2020, with Edinburgh’s usual festivities cancelled, the tradition of the theatrical ‘ghost light’ inspired a display of beams of lights emanating from the city’s empty venues. When theatres were allowed to open again, we revelled in the power of the shared experiences we’d missed, and the arts bounced back. However, plans for a major restoration of Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre had already been drawn up prior to Covid, and in summer 2022 the theatre closed again. Not dark and empty this time though – the contractors moved in, and a huge and expensive process was underway.…
Directors: Ilaria de Laurentiis, Raffaele Brunetti, Andrea Paolo Massara The great Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini is best known for films such as Rome Open City (1945), Germany Year Zero (1948) and Journey To Italy (1954), the last starring his third wife, Ingrid Bergman. These movies are startling in their raw texture and storytelling power, coming across like fragile works-in-progress and yet they’re indisputably complete. This new feature-length documentary doesn’t go over such neo-realist classics but instead explores the director’s life between 1956 and 1977, during which time some of his interests and priorities changed, while his attitudes hardened. He…
Writer: Giacomo Boeri, Alberta Molajoni Director: Giacomo Boeri Giacomo Boeri’s film Stories for Sandro is an imaginative account filmed over five years of Sandro, Boeri’s father, who is living with Alzheimer’s. Boeri cherishes the hope that if he can somehow use film to recreate some of Sandro’s memories, then perhaps the disease can be stayed. But he’s honest enough to include voices of dissent. He films his mother spelling out how Alzheimer’s progresses – Sandro will stop being able to recognise those closest to him. Whole chunks of his past memories will simply disappear. Boeri over time has to recognise…
Writer and Director: Akio Fujimoto Lost Land is not a a sophisticated film and at times you could wish for a bit more sign-posting and closer attention to continuity. But director and writer Akio Fujimoto gradually conveys a story of great power, following a group of Rohingya Muslims making the perilous journey from a refugee camp to hoped-for safety in Malaysia. What is particularly unusual is that the central figures are all Rohingyas, speaking in their native language. For about half the film, we follow the group from their frightening escape from a refugee camp. We’ve never told where this…
Writer and Director: Ryosuke Hayazaka It is fair to describe The Unluckiest Girl in the World as a little oddity. At well under an hour it is certainly short and the approach taken by writer / director Ryosuke Hayazaka is at times, strange. Aged 27 and working in Human Relations Yamanoura describes herself as The Unluckiest Girl in the World. Her fiancé vanished the day after proposing and she finds it hard to dump her current boyfriend despite his infidelity and habit of borrowing, but not repaying, money. When strolling in the street Yamanoura inevitably steps in gum. True to…