If theatre of the absurd tickles your fancy, you will have a field day with theatre company Pummel Squad’s Marginalia. It is a new play adapted from Nikolai Gogol’s 1936 satirical short story ‘The Nose’. That was about a St Petersburg official who awakens to find his proboscis has disappeared and taken on a life…
The bizarre meets the macabre and the maudlin in The Broken Mill. Through original song, storytelling and mime, six performers and four band members tell the tale of the manipulative and murderous Mama (Sarah Wall). She has taken in the destitute and disenfranchised and pulled together a cabaret involving misfits and mould breakers. Some are convinced she…
Vive la difference and don’t you get it in spades with this unexpected, fun and fanciful comedy set in a small French provincial village. The Bélier Family concerns a 16-year-old girl, played by newcomer Louane Emera (a former contestant on the French version of television’s The Voice). Her close bond to her beloved family is…
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel is reimagined for the stage in a fusion of ballet, tap and jazz. BIG Live is a welcome new voice in the performing arts – a ballet company where tradition meets innovation. Alongside narration of the tragic Gatsby storyline is a stunning score, bold choreography, striking sets and costuming,…
Guy Ritchie is a polarising figure in the world of cinema. Just about everyone you care to talk to will say they love his early work – Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) – but he then blotted his copybook with the widely-panned 2002 misadventure Swept Away, starring then-wife Madonna. But…
Maxine Mellor’s Horizon is an intense experience … not the type of show to be enjoyed so much as to provoked by. It is a sensibility that is conveyed from before its start thanks to an ominous pre-show soundscape and the gothic shadows of a darkened stage featuring a single white line as video backdrop…
Angel of Mine is a slow-moving thriller about intuition and obsession. Inspired by real events, it follows divorced mother Lizzie Manning (Noomi Rapace). She’s emotionally fraught, as she battles for custody of her son and juggles a job as a sales rep for a cosmetics line. An encounter with Lola (Annika Whiteley) turns Lizzie’s life…
Two gifted and extremely funny actors create an even bigger farce out of an already brilliant Victorian farce in an hilarious adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. They take Wilde’s late 19th century play – the ultimate comedy about manners – and turn the screws, assuming nine roles between them. David Wood and…
Darkest Hour is a kind of backgrounder on Winston Churchill’s “never surrender” speech. It also touches on the flotilla dispatched to fetch the British troops from the beach at Dunkirk (as to which, see Dunkirk). But this showy biopic has too much emphasis on levity. Joe Wright (Atonement) directs from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten (The…
Despite perceptions to the contrary, art and crime are never far apart. Dark deeds plagued Renaissance painters like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. The artist Walter Sickert has been accused (posthumously) of being Jack the Ripper. And the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre is one of many “crimes of the 20th Century”….
