The ever-welcoming, pocket-sized Jermyn Street Theatre, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus, is currently hosting the premiere production of In The Net by first-time playwright Misha Levkov, produced by WoLab: “a working laboratory for artists to create... the opportunity to have a go”. As always at this venue, the acting is of a high standard, always trying to get the best out of the material. Harry, the father, is perhaps Levkov’s most fully written role. We are told many times … [Read more...]

There are several good reasons for seeing this production of The Sleeping Beauty, apart from Tchaikovsky’s gorgeous music, stylishly played by the Royal Opera House Orchestra under Koen Kessels. Firstly there is Petipa’s original spectacular 1890 choreography, recreated by Frederick Ashton and others. Then there are the lavish designs by Oliver Messel, originally used for the 1946 Royal Ballet production, revived by Monica Mason and Christopher Newton in 2006 for the company’s 75th … [Read more...]

Playwright David French was born in 1939 in Coley’s Point, Newfoundland, where his 1984 play Salt-Water Moon is set, in 1926, soon after World War One, when Newfoundland provided a regiment of foot soldiers who were almost annihilated at the Battle of the Somme. This tragedy is made to resonate throughout the play. Jacob Mercer (Joseph Potter) returns one night to Coley’s Point, a low-lying promontory in the Gulf of St Lawrence, to meet his former girlfriend Mary Snow (Bryony Miller). We … [Read more...]

Lillian Hellman’s 1941 play Watch on the Rhine has been described as a “peculiar combination of drawing room comedy in a genteel...home with sinister corruption of the Nazi regime in Europe...a unique and powerful drama, one strong enough to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award”. The play was written in 1940 before the USA joined WW2, and called for an alliance against Hitler, thereby contradicting the Communist Party’s position at the time - Hellman having joined that party in 1938. The … [Read more...]

Antic Disposition specialises in “presenting innovative interpretations of classic plays.....in historic buildings and unusual non-theatre spaces”. Since Christmas 2012 the company has presented its adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in the mid-16th century Middle Temple Hall in the City of London. This spectacular venue, in which Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was first staged, adapts splendidly to Dickens’ tale, almost as if it were made for it, and one reason, one hesitates to say … [Read more...]