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Reviews by Alan Franks

West End and Off-West End reviews written by Alan Franks. Reviews are primarily for productions in London's West End and Off-West End venues.

Catch Me If You Can at Richmond Theatre | Review

April 12, 2022 Last updated: April 12, 2022 1:21 pm By Alan Franks

Gray O' Brien (Inspector Levine), Patrick Duffy ( Daniel Corban) and Linda Purl (Elizabeth Corban)- Catch Me If You Can- Photo by Jack Merriman

Even the title poses problems since there was a 2002 Steven Spielberg film with the same name, starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo Dicaprio. It told the allegedly true story of a prolific teenage con artist becoming a multimillionaire by posing as a Georgia doctor, a PanAm pilot and a Louisiana parish prosecutor. Nothing to do with this stage play by Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, except that both bear an obsession with duplicity and illusion, rather as a stick of rock bears lettering, and a … [Read more...]

Cluedo at Richmond Theatre | Review

March 9, 2022 Last updated: March 9, 2022 1:06 pm By Alan Franks

Cluedo

Perhaps there has been another board game that has enjoyed fresh life as a stage play, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of one. All right, Chess, but that was a musical. Cluedo, you may or may not remember, was a postwar sensation, a family-friendly whodunit centred on finding the identity of the murderer in a group of weekend revellers at a country house. It was the inspired invention of a musician called David Pratt who, according to his daughter, would spice family jaunts … [Read more...]

The Winston Machine at New Diorama Theatre | Review

January 29, 2022 Last updated: April 25, 2022 3:42 pm By Alan Franks

The Winston Machine - credit Cesare De Giglio.

Given the Kandinsky company’s ten-year history of theatrical experimentation, The Winston Machine was never going to be a conventional biodrama dedicated to the life and times of Britain’s renowned wartime leader. Its aims are rather more ambitious than that, and what emerges from this free-ranging and hyperactive hour-and-a-bit is the sense of Churchill not so much as an individual but as a sort of climate in which this nation has lived for the best part of a century. His presence, … [Read more...]

Freud’s Last Session at the King’s Head Theatre | Review

January 21, 2022 Last updated: January 21, 2022 10:15 pm By Alan Franks

(c) Alex Brenner, no use without credit, KHT - Freud's Last Session

It’s possible, though far from certain, that the committed Anglican author C.S. Lewis met the celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in London just before the outbreak of the second world war. No matter, they meet here all right, in the King’s Head revival of Mark St Germain’s Broadway hit, Freud’s Last Session. The place is 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud had come to live with his wife and youngest daughter Anna after escaping the Nazi occupation of his native Austria. … [Read more...]

Folk by Nell Leyshon at Hampstead Theatre

January 6, 2022 Last updated: January 6, 2022 4:16 pm By Alan Franks

Folk featuring Simon Robson and Mariam Haque. Credit Robert Day.

Cecil Sharp is no unsung hero. Without the energy of this driven and at times prickly musician, the traditional folksong of rural England would very possibly have faced extinction in the early decades of the twentieth century. His collecting of thousands of songs was nothing less than a mercy mission into an aural culture made precarious by the grave new world of mechanisation, migration and war-deaths in industrial quantities. In telling of his song-hunting encounter with the Somerset … [Read more...]

Terence Rattigan’s While The Sun Shines at The Orange Tree Theatre

November 25, 2021 Last updated: November 25, 2021 2:53 pm By Alan Franks

Rebecca Collingwood and Conor Glean in While the Sun Shines.

This early Rattigan play has had an interesting life. Set in the Second World War and premiered while that conflict still raged, it has since found itself rather upstaged by the author’s later and less comedic hits such as The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version. Fitting that it should have made its reappearance at the Orange Tree in Kew Road since his first major play, First Episode, was staged at the adventurous, now long defunct, Q Theatre, just a mile up the road. Appropriate too that … [Read more...]

The Good Life at Richmond Theatre

November 24, 2021 Last updated: November 24, 2021 2:00 pm By Alan Franks

The Good Life. Cast. Photo by Dan Tsantilis.

Lazily, the 1970s have been portrayed as a sort of hangover decade after the vividness of The Sixties; quaint old hippie tendencies having to shove over and make room for proper adult pursuits like careers and parenthood. The Good Life, the sitcom which ran on BBC1 for three years from 1975, rather muddied that simplistic picture, and a good job too. This stage version, based on the highly popular TV series, serves as a reminder that Tom and Barbara, the couple originally played by … [Read more...]

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Latest News & Reviews

Charlie and Stan at Wilton’s Music Hall

January 25, 2023 By Alan Fitter Leave a Comment

It seems very apt that the story of two English music hall performers, Charlie Chaplin and Stan … [Read More...]

Othello: A Frantic Assembly production, co-produced with Curve

January 25, 2023 By Louis Mazzini Leave a Comment

Like The Merchant of Venice, with its profound antisemitism, and the misogynistic Taming of the … [Read More...]

West End transfer of Rose, starring Maureen Lipman

January 25, 2023 By Admin Leave a Comment

After sell-out runs at Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester, and The Park Theatre, London, in 2022, Maureen … [Read More...]

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