Reviews

On a particularly warm and sunny evening, a hardy few theatre-goers ventured to see this well-written play and sat fanning ourselves with programmes, leaflets, other people’s hands etc. The story is that two middle-class couples have gone out to dinner and, upon returning to one of the couple’s homes where all are staying, find there has been a burglary. Things have been turned over and items stolen, but the safe left intact (along, curiously, with a large, centrally placed painting that draws the eyes and leaves one thinking ‘Why hasn’t that been pulled off the wall?’) The couples, as characters,

English literature students pore over Twelfth Night in preparation for their final exams, while scholars in Oxbridge colleges and plate-glass Midwest universities tell us that the play is anything from a study in anarchy to a commentary on social divisions in Elizabethan England. What they forget is that Shakespeare wrote it – possibly at the suggestion of Queen Elizabeth – as an entertainment pure and simple: a piece of theatrical candy floss for the Court to enjoy on Twelfth Night 1602. It is why the sub-title is What You Will – Shakespeare regarded his own comedies so lightly that he

Historical theatre doesn’t always make good contemporary theatre and to speak plainly, this play’s a struggle. It’s rarely been off the stage since its first production in 1889 and various great directors and actors have had a ball getting their teeth into its social agenda, but it’s a hard one for amateurs. Extremely avant garde in its day for its Darwinian depictions of class and sex struggles, and naturalistic in a brutal way theatrically, it doesn’t have the same impact in the first part of the 21st century. It’s all a bit D H Lawrence on stage but without any

Somewhat to my surprise, I find that this play originated as recently as 1975, yet it has the nostalgic feel of an older production. When I further realised that the playwright, Ben Travers, was 89 at the time of the original staging (which featured Helen Mirren as Ella) and that his major output before that was a series of farces in the ’20s and the ’30s, I had an inkling of why it seemed to belong to an earlier era. However, the 1970s saw such relaxation of theatre censorship that Travers and others could finally present plays about sex and

According to the programme notes, the title of this concert can be taken to mean not only music from many countries but also music from the different genres of the musical world, and both meanings certainly proved extremely apt in this thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable evening. The tone was set right at the beginning with the decidedly quirky introductions by MC Richard Bennett, several of them referring to the fact that certain choir members had misunderstood some of the song titles and which I might have believed had he not informed us that the Dave Clark Five’s ‘Glad all over’

Shell Shock is a new one-man play based on a novel of the same name by author Neil Blower. The play is a personal account of Tommy Atkins, a young man who has just completed his military service in the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment during the Iraqi War. His subsequent experiences are re-told by this empowering and extraordinary piece of theatre. With a sentimental underlying theme, this play highlights the aftermath which many of our ex-servicemen and women experience, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), referred to as ‘shell shock’ during the First World War. Rank, role or length of service is