Reviews

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

Every now and then, it feels a privilege to witness something for the very first time. Echo’s End – commissioned and produced by Salisbury Playhouse, in its world premiere run – certainly falls into that category. Set in 1915 Wiltshire, this is a beautifully written and crafted story of the domestic impact war has on the lives of two young people. John and Anna have grown up as childhood friends, with their families expecting this innocent closeness to blossom into something more. However, as John signs up to fight for his country and Anna ponders on a wider world than

When someone dies too soon, the feelings of shock and sorrow can lead to exaggerated descriptions of their virtues and qualities. This was certainly not the case when Jean Hancock died last year: the tributes to her kindness, her compassion, her humour, her dependability and her musical talents spoke no more than the truth. She was a familiar figure on the Bournemouth musical scene as an accompanist to all sorts of musical ventures, notably as rehearsal pianist for Bournemouth G&S Society. As ‘Fingers’ on the piano, she was also an integral part of the group called After Eight, which in