Richmond Theatre London Tickets

The two Alans, Ayckbourn and Bennett, are perhaps the only two living British playwrights who can be reasonably guaranteed to put bums on seats – at least in the regions. The former is 79 and the latter 84 and whilst the average age of their audiences is somewhat less their work is not designed to have youth appeal. That said the audience for Bennett’s The Habit of Art at Richmond Theatre had a sprinkling of young people dotted among those of more advanced years. This touring production is … [Read more...]

As unlikely stage hits go, few come unlikelier than Helene Hanff’s chronicle of a correspondence between two bibliophiles. You can almost see the gathering furrows on the brows of stage producers, never mind movie ones, as the author pitches her plotline about, well, that’s it really: two book-lovers writing letters to each other. A much-rejected author of play scripts, Hanff was nothing if not a clear-eyed expert on her own shortcomings. As she told The New York Times in 1982, “I wrote great … [Read more...]

Iolanthe takes the biscuit: it’s a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera (what on earth did I expect?). But there’s one aspect of this particular production that proves more touching than anything in the narrative, once it dawned on me that it wasn’t yet more satire. The production has in Mark Smith a deaf choreographer, so there are elements of British Sign Language embedded into the choreography, particularly in the exaggerated movements of the fairies, who possess supernatural abilities, including … [Read more...]