Thursday, November 3, 2011
Hull TruckLast December, John Godber parted company with Hull Truck, the company he helmed for 26 years, on less than cordial terms. That the first touring product of the newly founded John …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:51PMWednesday, November 2, 2011
East Midlands airport, DerbyshireYou can ask no more from a theatrical experience than that it takes you on a journey – except that it manages to get you safely back again. Yet this partic…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:20PMFriday, October 28, 2011
Hull Truck theatreYerma is not an outwardly complex play. Lorca's drama has a folkloric quality that can be summed up by a familiar children's rhyme: the farmer wants a wife, the wife wants …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:49AMWednesday, October 26, 2011
Playhouse, LiverpoolLizzie Nunnery's debut play Intemperance was a bold, Ibsenite epic set in 19th-century Liverpool, which suggested that this was a major talent destined for bigger stages.…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:46AMFriday, October 21, 2011
Theatre Royal, YorkDavid Harrower's play takes place in the filthy recreation room of an anonymous industrial unit. Middle manager Ray is being held to account by a young woman among the det…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:52AMMonday, October 17, 2011
Unity, LiverpoolKim and Jackson are having a trying day. In the past 12 hours they have been evicted from their apartment, shot at, lost in a subterranean sewer system and locked in a refrig…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:52PMFriday, October 14, 2011
Lowry, SalfordAmerica in the 1850s was fertile ground for hucksters, snake-oil salesmen and colourfully obsolete verbs – "swandangled", for instance. Penny Dreadful's melodramatic medicine…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:29PMTuesday, October 11, 2011
Crucible, SheffieldAfter almost 40 years on the road, the new-writing company Paines Plough has decided to build a theatre. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it has assembled on…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00PMSunday, October 9, 2011
Northern Stage, NewcastleFederico Garcia Lorca described his dramatic fable Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su Jardin (The Love of Don Perlimplin with Belisa in the Garden) as "an eroti…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:02PMFriday, October 7, 2011
Playhouse, LiverpoolWhat were the circumstances behind Hitler's rise to power? The usual answer involves rampant inflation, the weakness of the Weimar administration and the punitive terms o…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00PMThursday, September 29, 2011
West Yorkshire Playhouse, LeedsA good Lear is someone who can get through three hours of howling and humiliation without genuinely going mad. A great one is someone alive to textual hints an…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:10PMWednesday, September 28, 2011
Theatre Royal, YorkOriginally produced in 1968, Alan Bennett's first full-length stage play is not, strictly speaking, a play at all, but an old-school revue set in a very old school. The mi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:30PMTuesday, September 27, 2011
Octagon, BoltonThere are pleasanter – and shorter – plays than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But a good production, which David Thacker's certainly is, becomes an almost spiritual expe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00PMMonday, September 26, 2011
Rugby league has a surprisingly distinguished theatrical history, so why has our national game been neglected on stage?Mick Martin's new play Broken Time is a bracing account of the origins …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:52PMTheatre Royal, Wakefield It's curious that few genuinely enduring plays have been written about football, while rugby has produced at least two: David Storey's The Changing Room and John God…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:05PMThursday, September 22, 2011
Harrogate theatreYou wouldn't ordinarily turn to DH Lawrence for tales of the supernatural – or to pick up racing tips, for that matter. But his 1926 short story incorporates both. The eff…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:03PMWednesday, September 21, 2011
Hull TruckFollowing the fortunes of a group of Yorkshire colliery workers who trade pit helmets for straw boaters in their spare time, Richard Cameron's musical drama is like Brassed Off wit…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:37PMTuesday, September 20, 2011
Theatre by the Lake, KeswickArthur Schnitzler's sexually explicit play La Ronde attracted a fresh wave of controversy in 1998 when David Hare's two-handed adaptation at the Donmar Warehouse …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:40PMSunday, September 18, 2011
Tramway, GlasgowAndrew O'Hagan's 1994 debut The Missing was an arresting, genre-defying work – part speculative memoir, part Orwellian social reportage – that investigated the phenomenon…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:23PMFriday, September 16, 2011
Crucible, SheffieldThe African American playwright Don Evans was a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 70s, though his plays have never made much of an impact in this …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:43AMWednesday, September 14, 2011
Viaduct, HalifaxIn the preface to his translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters, Michael Frayn observes that the place where the family live remains anonymous: "But we know its spiritual name w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:10PMTuesday, September 13, 2011
Royal Exchange, ManchesterThe Royal Exchange has been transformed, in Ben Stones's elegant design, into a 1950s Parisian jazz bar where you mingle before the performance with hip young thing…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:20PMThursday, September 8, 2011
Theatre-by-the-Lake, KeswickDuring the second world war, children and adults seeking refuge from bombers were evacuated to rural havens, one of which was Keswick. The evacuees came from all …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:11PMWednesday, September 7, 2011
Nottingham PlayhouseGuardian cricket correspondent Mike Selvey recalls in a blog his shame at once failing to recognise the great Nottinghamshire and England fast bowler, Harold Larwood in t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00PMThursday, August 25, 2011
Vietnamese artist Ea Sola creates performance pieces featuring women farmers, aged 50-75. Alfred Hickling talks to her about her ever-evolving work, Drought and RainIn a sweltering hot theat…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:15PMMonday, July 25, 2011
Drama about offensive standup – such as Brian Marchbank's production about an ageing comic – only peddles tired and bigoted materialTime was, in order to become a successful standup come…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:01PMThursday, July 21, 2011
Grosvenor Park, ChesterAccording to the legend of the White Wizard of Alderley Edge, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are currently slumbering in a secret cave in Cheshire, fro…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:17PMWednesday, July 20, 2011
Grosvenor Park, ChesterNow in its second year, Chester's Grosvenor Park company has rapidly established itself as an attractive, northern alternative to the Globe and Regent's Park. Of cours…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:34PMFriday, July 15, 2011
Williamson Park, LancasterFor the past 25 years, the Dukes theatre's annual promenade has transformed Lancaster's Williamson Park into Middle Earth, Arabia, Emerald City, and the deep south.…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:19PMThursday, July 14, 2011
Stephen Joseph, ScarboroughIf Alan Ayckbourn is more widely known for his writing than his directing, his role as an adaptor of other people's work is least known of all. Yet Ayckbourn has p…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:14PMSunday, July 10, 2011
Lowry, SalfordMost performers try to avoid dying a death on stage: performance artist Marina Abramović approached director Robert Wilson with a request that he produce hers.has been making …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:01PM 
