Author: The Reviews Hub - Yorkshire & North East

Writer: Ned Blackburn Directors: Meg Bowron and Josh Stainer Following rave reviewers at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, An Adequate Abridgement of Boarding School as a Homo is enjoying a short UK tour with support from Arts Council England funding. As it reaches the end of its tour and lands in Sheffield for one night only, it is clear to see why audiences have already taken a great fondness to this play. The play follows Johnny and his ups and downs through life at boarding school as a queer individual. As the programme states, the play is not a coming out story.…

Choreographers: James Pett, Travis Clausen-Knight, Ed Myhill, Camille Giraudeau, Marcus Jarrell Willis and Yusha-Marie Sorzano Interplay (noun) – the action between two or more things or the effect they have on each other. A fitting title for Phoenix Dance’s 2026 tour. Interplay brings together four very different but related dance pieces. It is an evening all about connections: how we make them, how they feel and how we react to their loss. Next of Kin (Marcus Jarrell Willis) is an antagonistic, competitive but ultimately supportive duet between what can reasonably be assumed to be two siblings, with a shadowy authoritarian mother figure standing motionless behind them. It is full…

Writer: John Godber Director: Jane Thornton Sit down, settle down, stop chewing gum, stop running Simon Patterson! It’s time for the end of term assembly at Whitehall Academy, and Year 11 BTEC Drama students Salty (Levi Payne), Gail (Jo Patmore) and Hobby (Sophie Suddaby) are here to show us their coursework as a celebration of the arts in schools, and as a thank you to the Drama teacher who motivated them along the way. Because Salty, Gail and Hobby aren’t normally the most motivated of kids. No-one at Whitehall is. They’re the rejects, the burnouts and the kids that teachers…

Writer: Enid Blyton Music: Ian Ross Adapter and Director: Emma Rice Take Enid Blyton’s much-loved series of boarding school novels (written between 1946 and 1951) that have been passed between mothers and daughters for nearly eighty years – add a generous helping of live music, physical theatre, puppetry and comedy and somehow the result feels both entirely faithful and happily new. Blyton’s books were themselves rooted in real life. Her elder daughter Gillian attended Benenden School, which had relocated during the Second World War to a hotel on the Cornish coast. It’s that cliff-top, castle-like setting that gave rise to…

Writer: Joe Mallalieu Director: Tess Seddon RUM, produced by Emmerson & Ward Productions, works perfectly because of Joe Mallalieu’s total conviction as  writer and performer and because of a dramatic climax that forces you to re-consider all that has gone before. Spoilers are out, though the well-publicised involvement of Andy’s Man Club offers a hint, so this review will offer a partial account of what we see. Mallalieu is Danny, a skilled plasterer with a tendency to go off the rails from time to time. He is “rum”, frightened of no one, prepared to face down his customers if need…

Writer and Director: Kate Bramley Crumbs is one of many puns in Kate Bramley’s cookery comedy for Badapple Theatre, now an associate company of York Theatre Royal. It’s a simple concept, though far from a simple performance by Ellen Carnazza who delights the audience with her virtuoso one-woman stint through two halves of some 40 minutes each. Petronella Parfait is a celebrity television cook, just removed from her BBC show and welcoming the audience to the first night of Dough My Gosh, her new channel. There is some mystery over how successful Petronella is: we, the audience, are all Crummies (she…

Writer: Marc Graham Director: Paul Smith This is Middle Child’s first production in their new studio theatre, converted from a nail salon at 69 Humber Street in Hull’s Fruit Market. By great ingenuity in terms of space, Middle Child has managed to squeeze in 70-plus seats in a steep rake and sufficient toilets, the stage adequate, if entries can be somewhat awkward. Black-out curtains are used to good effect, there is no permanent box office – and a neighbouring bar supplies drinks in plastic glasses for in-house consumption. You can sense a great deal of good will from businesses on…

Writer: Caroline Graham Adapter and Director: Guy Unsworth  Just like Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead and Jessica Fletcher’s Cabot Cove, it’s a wonder why anyone would want to live in the county of Midsomer, what with its per capita murder rate being through the roof. At the time of writing, Midsomer Murders has been presenting grisly homicide in a quaint English setting for nearly forty years, starting with the publication of Caroline Graham’s first of seven Chief Inspector Barnaby books in 1987, followed by the launch of the popular television adaptation in 1997, which currently boast 144 episodes. That’s a lot of dead bodies!  And now…