Reviews

Blithe Spirit is one of Noel Coward’s best-loved plays. Written more than 75 years ago, it has a relatively timeless quality and with a supernatural theme, it is easy to understand why the play remains incredibly popular, both in amateur and professional productions. If you’ve never seen the show, the premise is that Charles Condomine has invited local eccentric medium Madame Arcati to conduct a séance at his house, with the purpose of uncovering the ‘tricks of the trade’ that he can use to develop in his next novel about a homicidal medium. Things don’t go as expected when the

With corpses littering the stage during the final scene of Hamlet, the mention of two more deaths passes almost unnoticed, but it is this line that Tom Stoppard took as the title for his first major play, which had its London premiere fifty years ago this year. It follows the lives of the two title characters more or less during the action of Hamlet, so at the start of the play they are on a journey; its destination turns out to be Elsinore, where they are charged by Claudius to help his troubled nephew/stepson and their old schoolfriend, Hamlet. They

Humourist, writer, entrepreneur and often-quoted bloke, Mark Twain, once said, ‘Facts are stubborn, but statistics are pliable.’  Well here’s one for you, Mr Clemens: 100% of divorces start in marriage.   ‘Ah, yes, divorce,’ remarked the much-lamented late, great Robin Williams, ‘from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet.’  In our more liberal culture, perhaps this is a tad unreasonable, but as a description of an horrendous, gut-wrenching route, we get the picture. The Maintenance Man is a bitter-sweet and sometimes insightful look at the breakdown of a marriage and the waxing and waning of

Plays ’n’ Chips enables new or inexperienced members of Broadstone Players to take to the stage, so the usual criteria for casting, and thus audience expectations, don’t apply. On this occasion, two of the evening’s three one-acts also had first-time directors. The evening begins with Martin Downey’s Out for the Count, a Dracula spoof. Such plays might seem ideal for newcomers but they contain a greater challenge. In order to parody, you need first to be able to do it straight – and with self-belief. This particular performance lacks pace and confidence, jokes becoming laboured, forced or lost. Learning to

Who would have thought that the combination of Shakespeare with rock ’n’ roll music would be such a genius idea? I’m sure the Bard would approve! Return to the Forbidden Planet by playwright Bob Carlton is a jukebox musical based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Set on a spaceship, it is full of cheesy dialogue, even cheesier dancing and a rock ’n’ roll score to die for. This ambitious production would be a challenge for a mature cast, let alone a cast with an age range from 8 to 17. Yet I was pleasantly surprised by RAODS youth members, who pull