Andrew Hilton’s new production of “All’s Well The Ends Well” makes the most of the complexities of this ‘problem play’, neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:27PMLesley Manville’s performance as Mary (pictured below), the tortured morphine addict, wife and mother in Eugene O’Neill’s dark masterpiece “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” at the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:25PMPaul Mahon’s Hamlet in Andrew Hilton’s production for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory bristles with teen spirit and this is no bad thing. The Prince of Denmark, even before his father…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:04PMChristmas pantomime is all about letting go, and being carried away on a wave of communal jollity. The genre also delights in carnivalesque gender-bending, the anarchic undermining of author…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:51PMTom Morris has a strong feel for drama that explores the personal implications of fanaticism: his production of John Adams’s powerful opera The Death of Klinghoffer for New York's Met and …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:17PMBrian Friel’s Living Quarters ranks with his best plays but isn’t as well known. This powerful story of family dysfunction was first performed in the UK in 1991, directed by Andrew Hilto…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:47AMComplicité have, for several decades, been Britain’s most consistently adventurous theatre company. The term ‘physical theatre’ sells them short, for the intelligence of their shows, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:27AMAndrew Hilton’s immensely enjoyable Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory production of the Sheridan classic opens with a display of hilarious brio from Byron Mondahl, who steps into the inti…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMTeen spirit explodes time and time again in the intimate space of Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, with piercing electronic sounds, fierce lighting and a torrent of high-energy movement. The fre…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMTurning John Cleland’s 18th century erotic classic “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” into a convincing stage play is a tall order. The book, a product of male fantasy, is a catalogue of…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMThe popularity of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” owes a great deal to the play’s brilliant weave of themes and ideas, declined through characters from two different historical periods – …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMAndrew Hilton, the creative force that drives the consistently excellent Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, might be playing safe by returning to a play he put originally put on in 2003.&nb…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:52AMPlunging into the lonely vortex of the long distance web wanker isn’t obviously gripping theatre, but Chris Goode’s seventy-minute descent into tawdry solitude and digital fantasy doesn�…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:21AM“The Little Mermaid”, along with many other classic tales, suffers from having been Disneyfied: Hollywood made sure that the shadows darkening Hans Christian Andersen’s original were s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:15AMNeil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of “Oliver Twist” and “A Christmas Carol”, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fictio…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMIn spite of a text that feels at times like Shakespeare by numbers, Andrew Hilton’s tightly-knit company has once again pulled off an evening of captivating theatre. As in other production…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMThe thing about puppets, as those who have handled them know all too well, is that they take over. They have a life of their own. This is all fine and good as long as the puppet-masters don�…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:45PMPerforming Shakespeare in a former South Bristol cigarette factory in South Bristol has become something of a ritual for Andrew Hilton and his close-knit company. Any act of ritual req…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:00PMJohn O’Keeffe’s 18th century classic Wild Oats is a play about players and an uproarious love letter to the theatre: a perfect fit for the re-opening, after 18 months of massive refurbis…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMKing Lear was the play that launched Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory 12 years ago. The company, under the inspired artistic direction of Andrew Hilton, opened its 2012 season with a brand…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:58AMCoram Boy is a thrilling story of dead babies, teenage love, material greed and the redeeming power of music. This is Christmas entertainment that packs a powerful punch, borne aloft by the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM