Tag Archives: Review

Director: Ben Pettit-Wade Company: Hijinx in association with Spy Monkey Reviewer: Beth Steer At just over an hour long, Hijinx and Spymonkey’s latest production, The Flop, is anything but. Charting the marriage of Marquis de Langey (Iain Gibbons) and Marie Sant-Simon (Jess Mabel Jones) in mid-1600s Paris, where impotence is illegal, and the King is revered, this fantastic piece of ...

Creators: The Pappyshow Reviewer: Simon Topping Ten men of colour stand on stage as the lead dancer proclaims, “This is a celebration of our manhood. Let’s start with a fight scene!” This is the explosive start to what is an hour of mesmerising, moving and funny group movement and storytelling from the ensemble. Formed in 2013 to train actors in ...

Creator: Tom Walker Reviewer: Simon Topping Bursting onto stage red-faced and raging from the start, Jonathan Pie barely takes a breath as he launches into his first tirade of a short 40-minute set. The creation of Tom Walker, Pie, a fictitious news reporter of no fixed channel, has become a YouTube sensation in the past year or two, gaining millions ...

Writer:  Robert Graves Director:  Fidelis Morgan Reviewer:  Richard Maguire This is an odd one: a ‘lost’ Robert Graves play which documents the aftershocks of war and, surprisingly, has two characters, one male and one female, struggling to come to terms with their homosexuality. Very funny and almost embarrassingly melodramatic, it’s difficult to label this play with a genre. Perhaps, as ...

Writer:  Emma Rogerson, Will Owen, Jonathan Brandt, Niall Urquhart, Christine Roberts Director:  Kasia Różycki Reviewer:  Richard Maguire Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an uncategorizable collection of stories and myths, based on Greek and Roman Gods, some familiar, some little known. All of the tales feature some kind of transformation, which come either as rewards or punishments. Ovid’s hotchpotch approach, however, does not quite ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Lindsay Posner Designer: Lee Newby Reviewer: Ron Simpson In both Lindsay Posner’s contributions to the four-play Shakespeare season at York’s pop-up Elizabethan theatre, he opts for a radical and precise updating. However, while the 1932 Italy setting of Romeo and Juliet is integral to the production and offers a different angle on the play, the contemporary ...

Writer:  Daniel Keene Director:  Edwina Strobl Reviewer:  Richard Maguire Working in partnership with The Refugee Council, Boxman is the desolate story of Ringo, an asylum seeker sleeping rough in London. Ringo lives in a world of shadows, where invisible to passers-by he’s haunted by ghosts of the past. Boxman is a quiet and understated portrayal of loss. Eschewing the traditional narrative of ...

Writer: Boublil and SchÓnberg Music: Claude-Michel SchÓnberg Lyrics: Richard Maltby, JR and Alain Boublil Director: Laurence Connor Choreographer: Bob Avian Reviewer: Georgie Bird Cameron MacKintosh brings his revamped production of Miss Saigon to Theatre Royal Plymouth. Set during the Vietnamese war, it tells the story of orphan Kim, who is forced to work in a brothel but falls in love ...