Review: When We Are Married
April 9, 2009
Date reviewed: 8 April 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
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.
Review: Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness
March 11, 2009
Date reviewed: 10 March 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
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.
Review: Into the Little Hill and Down by the Greenwood Side
March 9, 2009
Date reviewed: 7 March 2009
Venue: Howard Assembly Room
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.
Review: Can Any Mother Help Me?
March 6, 2009
Date reviewed: 5 March 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
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.
Review: The Convict’s Opera
February 26, 2009
Date reviewed: 24 February 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
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.