Review: When We Are Married

April 9, 2009

(Left to right): Polly Hemingway, Les Dennis, Tricia Kelly, Graham Turner, Gabrielle Lloyd and Paul Bown in the West Yorkshire and Liverpool Playhouses' joint production of 'When We Are Married'. Photo: Keith PattisonDate reviewed: 8 April 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse

star

From the outset we feel on safe ground with the West Yorkshire Playhouse/Liverpool Playhouse production of When We Are Married, JB Priestley’s classic comedy of West Riding mores. Colin Richmond’s set is solid, but transparent: the 1908 sitting room is the image of Edwardian respectability, with hall, staircase and (occasionally) dining room half-visible, the gateway to that strange world where servants rebel and photographers fall into drunken sleep. And the brass band plays – predictable, but wholly appropriate.

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Review: Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness

March 11, 2009

Emma Handy and Sam Cox in Headlong and Nuffield Theatre's 'Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness'. Photo: Ellie KurttzDate reviewed: 10 March 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse

star

First performed at Plymouth’s Drum Theatre in May 2002 with author Anthony Neilson as director, Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness has now been revived by Headlong and Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre, with Steve Marmion as director. The company, which recently produced cricketing comedy The English Game, professes to “aim constantly to push the imaginative boundaries of the stage”, and its decision to produce Edward Gant could hardly be more consistent with this objective. It is a vivid and searching depiction of a Victorian freak show’s last performance under the leadership of the insistently philosophical Gant.

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Review: Into the Little Hill and Down by the Greenwood Side

March 9, 2009

The Opera Group and London Sinfonietta's 'Down by the Greenwood Side'. Photo: Opera GroupDate reviewed: 7 March 2009
Venue: Howard Assembly Room

star

This double bill of Harrison Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, a joint production by the Opera Group and London Sinfonietta, was first staged at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre in February and the Leeds performances complete a short tour.

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Review: Can Any Mother Help Me?

March 6, 2009

Helen Cartwright, Catriona Martin, Lucy Tuck and Samantha Fox in 'Can Any Mother Help Me?'. Photo: Robert DayDate reviewed: 5 March 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse

star

There can be little doubt that Jenna Bailey’s book Can Any Mother Help Me? merits adaptation. A study of the Co-operative Correspondence Club, a group of lonely mothers that wrote candid letters about their lives to one another between 1935 and 1990, its subject matter is illuminative on human and academic levels alike. Similarly, Foursight Theatre’s credentials for delivering this adaptation are beyond doubt – the axis of the company’s work is the accentuation of female perspectives in history. However, the pristine logic that determined its route to production is dubious in one respect: its premise that a series of letters can successfully be translated into a play.

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Review: The Convict’s Opera

February 26, 2009

Out of Joint's 'The Convict's Opera'Date reviewed: 24 February 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse

star

Few playwrights are more skilled than Stephen Jeffreys in the art of recreating a text for the contemporary stage, as in, for example, his classic adaptation of Hard Times. Similarly Out of Joint and its director, Max Stafford-Clark, have already staged one play, adapted from an existing source, about convicts in Australia performing an 18th century comedy: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s splendid Our Country’s Good, based on The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally.

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