North East & Yorkshire

Writer: Hassan Mahamdallie Directors:  Evie Manning and Rhiannon White Reviewer: Rich Jevons Common Wealth produce site specific theatre and are based in Bradford and Cardiff. They have an impressive roster of previous work including Radical Acts, We're Still Here, No Guts, No Heart, and Our Glass House.  I Have Met the Enemy is directed by Evie Manning and Rhiannon White ...

Book: Kevin Del Aguila Original Music & Lyrics: George Noriega & Joel Someillan Director: Kirk Jameson Reviewer: Mark Clegg DreamWorks Animation’s 2005 movie Madagascar does not immediately seem to be a suitable basis for a theatrical musical. The film follows a group of very cartoony zoo animals as they escape their enclosures and blunder around New York before getting recaptured ...

Writer:  Martin McDonagh Director: Mark Babych Designer: Sara Perks Reviewer: Ron Simpson The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the first, and best known, of a trilogy of plays set in Leenane in Connemara and written in the 1990s. Since then Martin McDonagh has made his name even further West with such films as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. As revealed ...

Writer: Oliver Emanuel Director: Gareth Nicholls Designer: Cecile Tremolieres Reviewer: Ron Simpson According to the play text, The Monstrous Heart is “thrilling, chilling, witty and surreal”. It’s all those things, plus challenging, opaque and, at the end, melodramatic. In his acknowledgements Oliver Emanuel expresses gratitude for being encouraged to say what he wanted to in “the way I wanted to ...

Music: Giacomo Puccini Director: Phyllida Lloyd Conductor: Renato Balsadonna Reviewer: Dawn Smallwood This Opera North’s production of Puccini’s La Bohème returns since its last showing in 2014.  This tragic opera, set to Guiseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica’s text, is based on Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème and also his play, La Vie de bohème – collaborated with ...

Writers: Helen Monk and Matt Woodhead Director: Matt Woodhead Reviewer: Rich Jevons Lung Theatre Company opens the newly refurbished Leeds Playhouse in this much-anticipated production. It is based on the 2014 'Trojan horse' scandal in Birmingham which obtained considerable press coverage and vehement debate. Prompted by a suspect letter that planned the infiltration of Birmingham schools by Muslim extremists. This ...

Writer:  Richard D. Cushing Director: Eric Loren Designer: Ed Ullyart Composer: David Barton Reviewer: Ron Simpson Horseshoes for Hand Grenades is a new play about the First World War by Richard D. Cushing, an American writer long domiciled in Britain. It grew from a short story of his that, as he says, “didn’t want to end”. Neither does the play ...

Writer: Daniel Kanaber Director: Adam Quayle Reviewer: Alice Hiley It all starts with a sleeping bag drying by a campfire. It's just been pissed on, and Paul (Darren Kuppan) is pretty sure Mike's (Kyle Rowe) the one who did it. Spanning half a lifetime, Box of Tricks theatre's Under Three Moons leads us through three significant stages in the lives ...