Patricia Cornelius is one heck of a writer. She doesn’t pull her punches. Her dialogue hits you between the eyes. And so it is with RUNT, which she has co-created with her collaborators in an earlier multi award-winning work, SHIT, Susie Dee and Nicci Wilks. RUNT benefits from a stellar solo showing by Wilks, a searing…
A slow moving, wordy piece about loneliness, fragility and connection, I can’t say The Curtain lit up my life. Set in a small country town, Ada Munroe (Milijana Čančar) is a widow. She lost her husband John some time ago and on the anniversary of his passing each year she visits his grave and then…
Being a teenager … trying to make your way in the world can be challenging and scary. So it is for this group of seven Year 12 students at a high achieving Stockport (a town near Manchester, where playwright Simon Stephens grew up) grammar school, who are about to sit their end of year exams. A…
Coping with death and significant illness resulting in death isn’t easy for anyone. When it affects one’s nearest and dearest it is particularly harrowing. What if inside two years both your spouse of nearly four decades and adult child pass away? How would/could you handle that? In an instant, life as you had known it…
Coping with death and significant illness resulting in death isn’t easy for anyone. When it affects one’s nearest and dearest it is particularly harrowing. What if inside two years both your spouse of nearly four decades and adult child pass away? How would/could you handle that? In an instant, life as you had known it…
Questions of morality and decency are at the heart of an outstanding comedic drama concerning the interactions of two night security guards and two police officers in New York. Jeff (Charles Grounds) was booted out of the navy after three years for dope smoking, something his father – who was a naval hero – was…
Surviving the hardships inflicted by the Nazis on Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust was a perilous proposition at best. Some played music and staged plays while interned to maintain a level of normality. The Ghetto Cabaret pays tribute to the fighting spirit of the Jews in those turbulent times. Galit Klas (who is also one…
In 1929, Virginia Woolf reflected on the treatment of women in general and female authors in particular. Her searing essay, A Room of One’s Own, has now been adapted for the stage. Woolf didn’t hold back. She laid it on the line, pointing out what theatrical adapter and director Peta Hanrahan calls “the profound inconsistencies,…
Over the years, a number of well-known names – like John Hurt and Harold Pinter – have performed Samuel Beckett’s one-person, one-act play, Krapp’s Last Tape. Now the indefatigable Max Gillies joins them I’m a Gillies fan. He certainly doesn’t let you down as he takes on the persona of a 69-year-old man who looks…
Mayhem abounds in Travesties. Set in Zurich in 1917, the play follows a British consular official, Henry Carr, who locks horns with a Dadaist, Tristan Tzara. Dadaism is an artistic movement that started around the First World War, meant to ridicule the meaninglessness of the modern world. Carr also falls for Cecily, a librarian with…
