Reviews

If you don’t get the ingredients right, then pie can be pretty boring, and even a side of something new might lack appeal, leaving those who have eaten the dish feeling rather unsatisfied. However, had this particular pie been on one of the TV cookery competitions, I have no doubt that it would have emerged the winner, with all those tasting it going back for more. BMT simply seem incapable of getting it wrong and, not for the first time with this company, I am struggling to find something new to say that will adequately describe just how very good

Opening to sensational reviews and recipient of a number of major awards including Best New Musical at the London Olivier Awards 2011, Legally Blonde tells the story of Elle Woods as she gains a place at the prestigious Harvard Law School with the aim of winning back the heart of her teenage heart-throb, Warner Huntington. She discovers how her knowledge of the law can help others while staying true to herself. With a clever and catchy musical score by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin, this show is full of energy, charm – and plenty of pink! Watch out, Sheridan Smith!

I wasn’t quite sure of what to expect from this production: would it be a pantomime, a play with music or something else entirely? Given whatever the Caterpillar was smoking, the liquid Alice drank to shrink herself and the piece of mushroom she was told to eat, perhaps I should best describe the evening as a trip. Leesa Agar, making her directorial debut with support from assistant director Sally Whyte, has done a cracking job of bringing the well-known characters and stories to life and the end result certainly proves to be a trip worth taking, with even the tiniest

With the sparse setting of the corner of a field strewn with rubbish, complete with abandoned seats accompanied by urban grime music in the background, there is no doubt that DNA by Dennis Kelly is going to be an edgy, modern play. It centres around a gang of tough misfits dealing with the consequences of a practical joke that ends in tragedy. How they deal with the subsequent guilt of their actions and the group mentality that follows is compelling stuff. This haunting story has echoes of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – not always to everyone’s taste, but

One of the joys of tuning into Radio 4 Extra is hearing ‘Coronation Scot’, followed by the suave tones of Peter Coke as Paul Temple and the cut-glass accent of his wife, Steve, played by Marjorie Westbury. The adventurous couple’s creator, Francis Durbridge, also wrote thrillers of rare talent and ingenuity, and Suddenly at Home is one of his best, to which this production does full justice. It is not so much a whodunnit as a ‘willtheygetawaywithit’, since the murder is committed on stage before act 1 is half over and there is never any doubt about who are the