Reviews

I’ve been looking forward to this play for a while; I always love watching different material being delivered by talented local theatre enthusiasts. This play boasts a) being different and b) talent; furthermore, I was surprised to find out it was also a musical! Co-Directors Harriet Cairnes and Julie Sturmey must be brimming with pride with this most recent production. The play was written by Kjartan Poskit and it was originally created for a large am-dram group. Over 300 hundred performances later, the play has landed in Poulner Players’ very capable hands. If you don’t know who Henry VIII is,

Get ready to be blown away by this terrific production of Peter Pan. Having watched practically every show Swish have performed at the Pavilion I have never yet been disappointed, and this was no exception. For those of you not familiar with the J M Barrie’s story, Peter Pan (a boy who never gets grows up) and his friend Tinker Bell, a fairy, whisk away siblings Wendy, John and Michael to the island of Neverland, where Captain Hook seeks vengeance against Peter for cutting off his hand. Sofia Ferreira, the Storyteller and later the grandmother, was exceptional in her storytelling.

I never saw the original production of this adaptation of Peter Pan, although I’ve treasured its cast recording for years, and so I was very much looking forward to seeing CPYT perform it. Having seen many adaptations of this story (a lifelong personal favourite), I knew already that George Stiles and Anthony Drewe had created a charming score with some lovely melodies and lyrics both witty and touching. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that Willis Hall’s book, while retaining a fair amount of J M Barrie’s original dialogue, is still very much its own creation. Surprisingly, the adaptation has dispensed

A working-class Jewish boy from the Bronx and a middle-class Englishman educated at Haileybury can’t have much in common, can they? Yet Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn share the gift of taking ordinary people in a domestic setting and using them to reveal eternal truths about the human condition – the weaknesses, the passions and the fears which we all experience and which many of us hate to reveal. What makes both writers geniuses is that they also write superbly crafted comedies which can be enjoyed just for their stylishness and wit. Proof for such high-flown claims can be found

Famous romantic novelist, Janet Preston, arrives back at her remote Yorkshire Moors cottage and is shocked to find on arrival a mysterious man sitting in her living room – the shock is exacerbated by the fact that she has recently finished off her husband and, despite her confidence that she will get away with her crime, has yet to remove all the evidence – including the body! By coincidence, the stranger shares the same name (George) as her departed husband – as well as being her husband’s criminal associate who has come looking for him after a botched bank robbery.

Eliza Doolittle is a young flower seller with an unmistakable Cockney accent which keeps her in the lower rungs of Edwardian society. When Professor Henry Higgins tries to teach her how to speak like a proper lady, an unlikely friendship begins to flourish. Based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, My Fair Lady is that rare musical by which all others are measured. The tale of a cockney flower girl transformed into an elegant lady features one of musical theatre’s greatest scores by Lerner and Loewe. It is a popular staple of theatre, not just maintaining but gaining new audiences throughout the