Author: The Reviews Hub - Central

Writer: Christy Lefteri Adaptors: Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler Director: Anthony Almeida The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a haunting and thought-provoking depiction of the reality many people face as they embark on highly dangerous and daunting journeys just for the chance of survival and safety, reliant on barely more than hopes and dreams. This is a poignant performance to be experienced in today’s climate of mass migration due to any number of life-threatening situations, war, persecution, disease or famine, the list goes on. Adapted from the 2019 novel by Christy Lefteri, it tells the story of one family’s journey from…

Writer: John Lutz Adaptor: Rebecca Reid Director: Gordon Greenberg Psychological thrillers built around the manipulation of an innocent victim have a long history, stretching back at least as far as Gaslight, a title that became a verb and remains part of the language. Single White Female, the book and its film adaptation, was an example from the 1990s, and both were very much products of their time; in these days of widespread social media use, will the storyline stand up? In response, adaptor Rebecca Reid has chosen not to make this version a museum piece, but to set it in the…

Writer: Bertolt Brecht Translator: Stephen Sharkey Director: Seán Linnen Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941 while he was in Finland waiting for a visa to enter the United States, having fled Nazi Germany eight years earlier. It was only a year since Charlie Chaplin had brought out his own parody of Hitler’s rise, The Great Dictator, and it is hard not to make the connection. Having lived and worked in the US for six years, and several times met Chaplin, in 1947 he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for suspected communist sympathies, and…

Writer: Robert Louis Stevenson Adaptor: Helen Eastman Director: Nicky Cox Creation Theatre has a history of seeking out different spaces in Oxford in which to perform, and the Ovada Gallery is, on the face of it, a challenge. A cavernous warehouse like a disused workshop or garage, with big, red-painted double doors and a long staircase up one side to a mezzanine floor, and black-curtained skylight windows: it requires some imagination to see it as a theatre in which to perform this version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic horror novella. But writer Helen Eastman and director Nicky Cox rise to…

Writer: William Shakespeare Directors: Joe Murphy and Madeleine Kludje Who would think an evening of revelry and joy with fairy folk could carry such profound messaging and further draw one’s attention to the looming threat of our ever-changing climate? But this modern interpretation of classic Shakespearean literature, while not necessarily to everyone’s taste, does just that, injecting a message relevant to our modern world without straying far from the original text. In her programme notes, Elizabeth Freestone, RSC associate and consultant, says that, despite the play being over 400 years old, it is a timely assessment of people-planet relations, something…

Writer: Andrea Levy Adapter: Helen Edmundson Director: Matthew Xia Small Island was written over two decades ago as a reminder of the hostility the Windrush generation encountered when they arrived in a country they regarded as their own. Sadly, it has become something more urgent than that. Matthew Xia’s production – a regional premiere, the first time Helen Edmundson’s adaptation has been seen outside London – makes no attempt to update or reframe Andrea Levy’s story for the present time. It doesn’t need to – the accusations of benefit-seeking, the instinct to protect women and children from newcomers, the casual,…

Book: Jessie Nelson Music and Lyrics: Sara Bareilles Director: Diane Paulus Joe’s Pie Diner is not, on the face of it, a place where life-changing things happen. People eat. Pies are made. The day passes. The recipe sounds simple enough – and in less assured hands it might stay that way. But this is Sara Bareilles’ Waitress, and the ingredients here are anything but ordinary. Based on Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film, Waitress follows Jenna, a waitress at the diner alongside her friends and colleagues Becky and Dawn. Stuck in an abusive and loveless marriage to Earl, she channels her frustrations…

Aljaž Škorjanec and Janette Manrara have spent a decade building a live touring format that’s some distance from the competitive ballroom where Strictly Come Dancing first made them household names. Let’s Face the Music and Dance! returns Škorjanec and Manrara to a format they showed us with last year’s sell-out A Night to Remember — the live band, the ensemble of dancers and singers presenting a fully-staged song-and-dance revue, and the same enthusiastic audience eager to see them at Symphony Hall almost a year on from their last visit. Symphony Hall is not a theatre, of course, and the production…