Tag Archives: Review

Writer: Kay Mellor Director: Kay Mellor Lyrics: Kay Mellor Music: Nick Lloyd Webber Reviewer: Lauren Humphreys Based on Kay Mellor’s 2000 TV Show about the lives of the members of a Leeds slimming club, Fat Friends has now had the musical theatre treatment. It’s six weeks shy of Kelly’s wedding and she’s ready to float down the aisle in her ...

Director: Joyce Nga Yu Lee Reviewer: Dawn Smallwood Mind the Gap returns with Mia, Daughters of Fortune after last year’s successful production, Contained. Mind the Gap, a Bradford based disability Theatre Company, explores issues through the eyes of performers who have learning disabilities. Mia, Daughters of Fortune features four performers who explore learning disability and parenthood. It is about Mia ...

Writer and Director: Anthony Neilson Reviewer: Richard Maguire The publicity for Anthony Neilson’s new comedy, Prudes, playing upstairs at the Royal Court, claims that this two-hander is a reaction to the ‘current sexual climate’. Coming after the Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo campaign, Prudes seeks to explore if it is possible to still have sexual desire amidst an atmosphere of remorse ...

Writer: Stewart Ennis Director: Peter Clerke Design: Ali McLaurin Lighting: Paul Froy Music: Richard Williams The Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva. Summer, but not any old summer. This was 1816, dubbed "the year without summer", incessant rain, thunder and lightning, cock's crowing at noon and orange snow covering the mountainsides. Months previously Mount Tamboro in Indonesia had erupted, spewing clouds ...

Writer: Charlotte Brontë Choreographer: Cathy Marston  Reviewer: Barbara Michaels For those of us familiar with one of literature’s most well-known heroines, it is not difficult to comprehend why the rightly praised Northern Ballet Company have transformed Charlotte Brontë’s novel into a ballet. While Brontë may have baulked at some of choreographer Cathy Marston’s more erotic interpretations, it has to be ...

Writer, Lyrics & Director: Poppy Burton-Morgan Music: Matt Devereaux Choreographer: Laura Kriefman Reviewer: Francesca Parker After the success of Metta Theatre’s, The Jungle Book, the hype surrounding their latest work was tangible and the performance eagerly anticipated. The Little Mermaid – Circus Spectacular had finally arrived at a relatively full house at Exeter Northcott as part of their UK tour. ...

Choreographer: Cathy Marston Composer: Philip Feeney Designer: Patrick Kinmouth Lighting Designer: Alastair West Reviewer: Leah Tozer Balancing Brontë and ballet is brave: poised between prose and pas, pathetic fallacy and precise footwork, narrative voice and choreographic action, Northern Ballet’s Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman of a ballet that’s as brave, and beautiful, as Brontë’s novel. Following the ‘poor, obscure, plain ...

Writer: Compton Mackenzie Adapted by: Philip Goulding Director: Kevin Shaw Designer: Patrick Connellan Reviewer: Ron Simpson Oldham Coliseum’s touring production of Whisky Galore is based on at least three promising ideas. Unfortunately, in Philip Goulding’s stylish, but dramatically inert, script and Kevin Shaw’s oddly conservative direction, none comes to fruition. Indeed sometimes the intentions seem to conflict with each other. ...