REVIEW: HEDDA GABLER (New Victoria Theatre) ★★★★
Woking’s New Victoria Theatre is perhaps best known for its staging of popular main stream productions, However occasionally it delivers a real “Tour De Force” and Director Ivo Van Hove makes his debut with a radical new version of Ibsen’s most famous play. Hedda Gabler has just returned from her honeymoon with George Tesman, an […]
REVIEW: JULIUS CAESAR (Bridge Theatre) ★★★★★
The arrival of Nicholas Hytner’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ has been highly anticipated. The classic historical tale of autocracy, treachery and mutiny is no easy challenge, particularly with the news that it was a promenade staging with audience involvement throughout, however it is one that is faced head on and smashed into a million […]
REVIEW: MADONNA OR WHORE? (VAULT Festival) ★★★★
THE MADONNA WHORE COMPLEX. THE SONGS OF MADONNA. The premise of ‘Madonna Or Whore?’ is an appealing one if you are attracted to both pop philosophy and the hits of the Italian American diva herself. It’s presented as part of the Vault Festival, with over three hundred new shows running from January 24th to March […]
REVIEW: THE UNGRATEFUL BIPED (White Bear Theatre) ★★★
Modern society blasts a lot of opinions into vast empty space: Via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… Cue the Underground Man, who, as adapted and portrayed by Philip Goodhew, records his video blog in a dingy London flat. After a pretty unsuccessful 40+ years on this planet, always at the sidelines, never part of ‘the group’, he […]
REVIEW: SHREK (Sunderland Empire) ★★★★★
A giant ogre, a talking donkey, a magical princess, a tiny Lord and a fire breathing dragon – all quite feasible characters for an animated movie but surely a challenge to portray as a live stage musical – or so you’d think, but under the expert direction of Nigel Harman (and aided in no small […]
REVIEW: Eugenius! (The Other Palace) ★★★
The Other Palace celebrates its first birthday with a full production of Eugenius! following a well-received concert performance at the London Palladium last year. The show is a new British musical written by Ben Adams and Chris Wilkins inspired by the films and music of the 1980s. Nerdy Eugene dreams of a distant world of […]
REVIEW: SILK ROAD (VAULT Festival) ★★★★
Silk Road is a new one-man play which captures the sinister beauty of the anarchic dark web. Through an effective combination of visual metaphors and poetic monologues, our protagonist Bruce takes us on a white-knuckle tour around this brave new world. Following the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road and self-appointed “Dread […]
REVIEW: THE GRIFT (Bethnal Green Old Town Hall Hotel) ★★
We are welcomed into the Old Town Hall Hotel, a grand establishment which often acts as a superb setting for performances, particularly immersive ones such as writer and director Tom Salamon‘s ‘The Grift‘. We are given a comical introduction from the charming Mark Oosterveen, who explains that we about to take part in “a practice […]
REVIEW: ORANGES & ELEPHANTS (Hoxton Hall) ★★★★★
One of the big revelations of modern times is that quite a lot of what we think we know in history is bollocks. The history of facts fell to ‘interpretation’, history’s version of #fakenews. Slanted and repossessed by people with their vested interests cloaking the truth. His-story is dull men in action slacks leading us […]
REVIEW: JERSEY BOYS (Milton Keynes Theatre) ★★★★★
Four Seasons. Four boys. Four stories. Unlike many ‘Jukebox musicals’ Jersey Boys doesn’t attempt to weave a fictional story around the songs of a famous artist or band; instead it focuses on the real story of the musicians in their road to fame and beyond. From the streets of New Jersey to the Rock and […]