Reviews

With its cracking tunes, brilliant lyrics, gripping story and range of characters, Oliver! is a natural favourite among amateur musical theatre societies. But those of us who are long enough in both the tooth and the memory will recall that when the show first hit the West End, what was talked about most was Sean Kenny’s set design. With its multiple revolves and levels, it was ideally suited to the episodic nature of the story; in fact, it is on record that much of the show was re-written during rehearsals to make best use of a set which was unlike

The Drowsy Chaperone (songs by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, and book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar) is quite a phenomenon, starting life as a party piece at a Canadian stag do and ultimately gracing Broadway and the West End stage. Theatre 2000’s director/choreographer, Angie Broomfield, has rather honed down this production at the Shelley Theatre, particularly with staging, but it says something for the writing that it still works very well. The performance begins with a dingy little man, ‘Man in Chair’, in an equally dingy apartment, breaking down the Fourth Wall and chatting about how the musicals

Does the price of fame always bring celebrities down? No, but in some case it can destroy their careers and end their lives as they know them. Birdland, written by Simon Stephens, is all a bit dark and depressing. The 1¾-hour performance, without interval, is a challenge for the audience in a number of ways. First, the play itself: not the strongest I have ever seen, a bit predicable and fully of clichés that do not really make the time fly by. I found myself looking at my watch, hoping that time had passed more quickly than it had. It

Ronald Harwood’s play about four elderly opera singers living in a home for retired musicians first saw the light of day in 1999, but it was not until 2012 that most people, myself included, came to know it through a film version that starred Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins. The film featured many more characters, too, whereas the stage version is a four-hander – just one of the meanings of its title, the other being a reference to the quartet from Rigoletto that will be sung as part of the home’s annual concert to celebrate Verdi’s

In October 2011, the anti-capitalist demonstrators going under the collective title of Occupy tried to set up a protest camp outside the Stock Exchange. Thwarted by a pre-emptive injunction taken out by the Corporation of London, they camped instead outside the west door of St Paul’s Cathedral, posing the Dean and Chapter a set of insoluble ethical, political and practical problems. Steve Waters’s play examines the range of solutions to those problems and in doing so highlights the intense quandary in which the Dean in particular found himself. St Paul’s Cathedral was closed for several days by the protest, which

The play is far more claustrophobic than either of the filmed versions and director Michael Goron exploits every inch of stage and lighting technique to ratchet up the tension between his performers. Steve Clark is quite beautifully monstrous as Jack Manningham, his very poise and ‘low’ voice showing from the onset his power over his new wife, Bella. At times I wanted literally to hiss my disapproval at his control and depth of sleaziness and vitriol. You could hear a pin drop at times, such was the audience concentration, and the odd concerned mutter that ‘he’ was about to or