If you want someone to tease out a story, if you want someone to winkle out the good bits, and the sad bits, the emotional bits and - crucially - the funny bits then Neil Gore is your go-to guy. And Townsend Productions, led by the indomitable Louise Townsend, would surely be your vehicle of choice to chauffeur the narrative around, perfectly conveying it to an audience. We would normally find Gore out front and centre stage getting chummy with his audience and delighting in the wink and the … [Read more...]
Romeo and Juliet at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre | Review
You know what they say: Location. Location. Location. After months and months of internal darkness what better place to re-discover the light than at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre: it’s as if the world has just been created and then - let there be theatre! - in all its wonder, in all its glory. Coming to this beautiful alfresco space is like entering - to borrow a phrase from Richard II - “another Eden, demi-paradise”. The location is perfect, and this show does it more than … [Read more...]
Gyrus and The Forest – Naked Frank Theatre on Location | Review
Lockdown: theatres dark; audiences shunned; creativity on hold. And: "No-one’s seen anyone in ages. Not just you.” Enter - or should I say exit - Stage Door the highly innovative and presciently bold Naked Frank Theatre who never shy away from the big issues - bullying, homophobia and here, in the whimsically allegorical Gyrus & The Forest - mental health. Yes, if you’d ventured down to the woods you sure would have had a big surprise stumbling across this troupe of itinerant actors … [Read more...]
Siobhan Dillon – One Voice – ‘truly tugs at the heartstrings’
I know we are in strange, cruel, enlightening pandemic times but it is not very often that a grown man can sit in front of his laptop in the morning and have tears streaming down his face. But this album - One Voice - did that to me. And in doing so I discovered a voice, a new voice, with the clarity of pearls gently dropping into the cool, crystal-clear water of mountain streams combined with an endearing passion that truly tugs at the heartstrings. Specifically what did it for me was the … [Read more...]
The Dock Brief by John Mortimer at the Cockpit Theatre London
John Mortimer’s two-hander is a classic of the genre - the genre being plays set within a legal framework: Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose (1964) comes to mind as does Terrance Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy (1946), as well as David Hare’s Murmuring Judges (1991). Mortimer was a lawyer by trade but after the success of The Dock Brief - originally a radio play - he went on to pen the popular Rumpole of the Bailey, commissioned by the BBC as a Play For Today before being developed as a series for … [Read more...]