Writer:  Iain Bloomfield & Lucy Hind Artistic Director: Iain Bloomfield Reviewer: Sheila Stratford The Netherlands is about being the parent of a child with complex disabilities. All parenthood is a journey.  Using an allegory in which a much-anticipated journey to Italy leads instead to The Netherlands, the play illustrates this particular journey. However, we see that with time and fortitude ...

Writer: Matt Grinter from the novel by Mary Shelley  Director: Rebecca Robson Designer: Molly Hawkins Reviewer: Leah Tozer Playing God in an Anglican chapel is, like Frankenstein’s Creature, ‘fearless, and therefore powerful’. Amongst the gravestones at Arnos Vale, Red Rope Theatre stitch together and stage their agonized, magnificently imagined Frankenstein’s Monster at the cemetery’s Victorian altar in Matt Grinter’s elegiac, gorgeously gothic imagining of Mary ...

Adapted by Jenny King Director: Eduard Lewis Reviewer: Mark Clegg Despite being the most famous monster of all time, as well as possessing frightening power and evil motivations, Count Dracula just isn’t scary anymore. Blame the numerous parodies and appearances in every conceivable medium from cartoons to cereal boxes, but Dracula has lost his bite. With this in mind, the ...

Director & Writer: Jean-Luc Godard Reviewer: Rich Jevons Director of some 127 films, including the recent Goodbye to Language in 3D, the 87-year-old narrates in a 10,000 Marlboro voice. It consists of a five-part mosaic of archive material and fictionalised sections that provide Godard’s radical discourse on the state of the world. In particular, the Middle East. The sporadic scenes ...

Writer & Director: Jim Finn Reviewer: Rich Jevons The narrative of Jim Finn’s The Drunkard’s Lament is based on letters by Branwell Brontë, on the subject (mainly) of his sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. And, of course, there is a fair amount about his addiction to liquor and opium, too. He also waxes lyrical about his affair with a married woman ...

Director: Hiroyasu Ishida Writers: Tomihiko Morimi (novel), Makoto Ueda (screenplay) Reviewer: Rich Jevons Hiroyasu Ishida’s coming-of-age anime is a fantasy with some incredible animation, from the characters in the rich narrative to the penguins and Jabberwockies in the magical mystery. The central character, 10-year-old Aoyama, embarks on a quest is to solve the mystery of why penguins are suddenly appearing ...

Director: Wash Westmoreland   Writers: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland & Rebecca Lenkiewicz Reviewer: Rich Jevons This biopic of French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette begins with her husband-to-be, writer and critic Henry Gauthier-Villars (known by his pen name Willy), visiting her as an ingénue in provincial Burgundy. We see them make love in a barn near her family home and this sets the ...

Writer: Bill Manhoff Director: Mark Stratton Producer: Sheila Carter Designer: Graham Kirk Reviewer: Ron Simpson The Owl and the Pussycat came to Thirsk Town Hall near the end of the third week of a four-week tour by the remarkable Esk Valley Theatre. Not content with a pretty much sold out month in the Summer at the Robinson Institute in Glaisdale, ...