34 stories by "Philip Radcliffe"
With a bloodthirsty, corpse-devouring plant called Audrey at the centre of events, we can only be in the Little Shop of Horrors. It's a far cry from Jack and the Beanstalk, but the Royal Exc…
No one is more prescriptive than Tennessee Williams when it comes to stage and set directions. As he got older and wiser he made allowances for directors and actors to have their say. "The m…
Instead of that small well-worn stone balcony in that courtyard in Verona, picture an extended well-worn cast-iron balcony in the Victoria Baths in Manchester. The young lovers have ample ro…
By picking his way through Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil's Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way enab…
Swedish director Maria Aberg, making her Royal Exchange debut, sets the play in 1945 post-war Britain and strives to play in the effects of war on the home front, where women are in charge a…
"It's all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind," advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a "love letter" to her. …
We are witnessing the end of an era in the long history of Manchester's theatreland: the disappearance, after more than 60 years, of the treasured Library Theatre. Coming full circle, it is …
There's no place like home " and home for writer Simon Stephens is Stockport. He doesn't live there any more, but he was born there in 1971 and still finds the place, particularly its seedie…
How many times can a director re-work the same show and still come up with something fresh, gripping and memorable? This is James Brining's third version of Sondheim's killer thriller musica…
The guilt of knowingly sending our sons to war with defective equipment and fatal results certainly resonates today. Who takes the blame? Do we get ministerial resignations or arms-dealers g…
You know it must be the holiday season when comic caper-loving Told by an Idiot run riot in the Royal Exchange. Expect the theatre of the absurd, with glimpses of Keystone Kops and Marx Brot…
It isn't so much man versus machine as man versus the man behind the machine. Famously, in 1997 the Russian chess grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov faced IBM's supercomputer RS/6…
What price a woman's liberation? And what price a man's self-defined honour? By pitching one against the other and against the backdrop of wedlock (the emphasis being on the "lock"), Ibsen f…
Let's Kick Racism Out of Football. Show Racism the Red Card. Say No to Racism. Such are today's campaign messages. And then there's the headline: "Colour Prejudice Problem" in a London…
"Work, more work and six foot of earth in the end. That's life," says John Rutherford. That single-minded work ethic is what drives him on and drives his family to despair and desertion. As …
On 1 July 1916, the battalion of Lancashire volunteers recruited from Accrington was all but wiped out in about 20 minutes as they took on the task of attacking the village of Serre on the o…
Having 30 "rats" running around hardly seems the stuff of festive fare, but since the begetter of the show is Carol Ann Duffy, known in her children's writing for dark fairy tales, we might …
Oh, how it's raining. Streaming down the windows of the dry goods store, Torrance Mercantile, in the Deep South, where Lady Torrance is marooned in a stiflingly small town and a loveless mar…
Like several of Bill Naughton's plays, Lighthearted Intercourse started life as a BBC Third Programme drama. When it was broadcast, in 1963, its title was, less provocatively, November Day. …
What's in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No-one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sorry…
Within hours of the opera buffs leaving town, having had their fill of Buxton Festivalia, the old spa changes gear for operetta. For three weeks, the town becomes the jolly international cap…
Visualise a large lost property office, such as that for Transport for London at Baker Street, which inspired this production, its racks stuffed with thousands of items, from false teeth to …
It's ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region's plac…
Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap's begetter Tony Warren, would be flu…
Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single…
