Tag Archives: Drama

Writer: Craig Taylor Director: Laura Keefe Reviewer: Scott Matthewman Craig Taylor’s short vignettes of modern life first appeared as a column in The Guardian, and were later collected into a book. In 2016, director Laura Keefe selected several of the published sketches and created an evening of entertainment for the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. Reviving that same work at the ...

Writer: Christopher Marlowe Adaptor: Kerry Frampton & Ben Hales Director: Kerry Frampton Splendid Productions have a mission; to entertain and educate, and on the basis of tonight’s performance and judging by the reaction of the mainly teenage audience, they did both. Taking the near 450-year-old play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, ...

Writer: Mary Shelly  Adaptor: Rona Munro Director: Patricia Benecke Reviewer: Matthew Forrest At this time of year, there is a tradition of ghost stories and a touch of the macabre in the air and here in Liverpool the Playhouse has bought into this big time with the staging of Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece Frankenstein. Adapted for the stage by Rona ...

Writer: Simon Stephens Director: Sarah Frankcom Composer: Jarvis Cocker Reviewer: Dave Cunningham Sarah Frankcom bows out as Artistic Director of The Royal Exchange not with a star-studded bang but an intimate, bittersweet family drama that has surprising bursts of humour and bags of charm. Christine (Rebecca Manley) is an alcoholic whose grown-up children have scattered to various northern towns. In ...

Writer: Christopher York Director: Paul Robinson Reviewer: Dominic Corr We’ve all been there, falling for the D.J, or at least mismanaging our time when we should be studying. Taken in by the appeal of the dancefloor, those choice beats and a posh postcode, Yasmin strikes up a relationship of sorts with Danny. It all seems to be going rather well, ...

Writer: Vasiliy Shukshin  Director: Alvis Hermanis Reviewer: Gus Mitchell Russia is not a country primarily known for its humour. Even its most famous ‘comic’ playwright (Chekhov) wrote primarily of wasted and frustrated lives, lost, lonely individuals, and the universal pity of our self-delusions. It was with great interest and a slight wariness, then, that I sat down for Shukshin’s Stories, ...

Writer: Bruce Norris Director: Michael Emans Reviewer: Dominic Corr The world never really changes, does it? The balance of offence, acceptance and hate simply shifts – given time, it will no doubt shift back. In a turbulent time, opinions which lay dormant are now unearthing themselves. Shifting from a culture in which the first black man was sitting in the ...

Writers: Matthieu Delaporte & Alexandre de la Patellière’s Adapter, Translator & Director: Jeremy Sams Designer: Francis O’Connor Reviewer: Lauren Humphreys Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière’s 2010 play Le Prénom was a hit of such magnitude it spawned not only a big screen French version in 2012 but a German film incarnation in 2018. Jeremy Sam’s translation, What’s in ...