Sunday, April 17, 2016
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 mix of emotio…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:27PM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Lesley 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 Bristol Old …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:25PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 25, 2016
Paul 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 die…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:04PM[SHARE]Monday, December 14, 2015
Christmas 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 07:51PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 15, 2015
Tom 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 th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:17PM[SHARE]Friday, September 25, 2015
Brian 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 Hilton fo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:47AM[SHARE]Monday, September 21, 2015
Complicité 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, from T…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:27AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Andrew 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 intima…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Teen 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 frene…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 12, 2015
Turning 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 sexua…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Saturday, April 5, 2014
The 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 " Romantic a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Andrew 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 06:52AM[SHARE]Friday, February 7, 2014
Plunging 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't do…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:21AM[SHARE]Saturday, December 28, 2013
"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 softene…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:15AM[SHARE]Friday, October 4, 2013
Neil 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 fiction. His "…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Saturday, April 13, 2013
In 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 productions …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Friday, March 15, 2013
The 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 08:45PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 21, 2013
Performing 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 03:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, September 13, 2012
John 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 refurbishmen…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 16, 2012
King 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 02:58AM[SHARE]Friday, December 23, 2011
Coram 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[SHARE] 
