The Royal Exchange has a true crowd-pleaser on its hands with Hobson’s Choice. Full-blooded characters, a wonderfully comic script and just enough poignancy and social commentary to give the whole thing substance – all this is sandwiched between opening and closing sequences buzzing with colour, music and dance. It is utterly engaging from start to … More Hobson’s Choice – Royal Exchange
When Lydia was 19 and abroad, she was violently assaulted in the course of a robbery. Having been beaten and ‘stripped’ at gunpoint, she made her way home, told her three childhood friends that she was “absolutely fine” and proceeded to withdraw into her parents’ attic to sew. And sew. dressed explores Lydia’s relationship with clothes … More dressed – HOME Mcr
Judy and Johnny are “terribly”, “appallingly” happy in their 1950s house, complete with bright yellow kitchen, jazzy wallpaper and vintage fridge. In her swirling, candy-striped skirt and tightly coiffured hair, Judy skips lightly around the kitchen, dutifully taking the top off Johnny’s breakfast egg and inviting him to choose between home-made marmalade and home-made lemon … More Home, I’m Darling – Lowry
“Was that it? Wooosh – that was your life.” Arthur and Edie met when they were 13 and 11 and have lived all their married life in the farmhouse that Arthur inherited from his parents. We meet them on a day when everything is about to change – practically and symbolically. Edie’s creeping dementia has … More Visitors – Oldham Coliseum
With youth gangs and knife crime uniquely able to nudge Brexit off the front pages, the Royal Exchange’s revival of West Side Story seems particularly timely. This familiar tale has one set of immigrants (‘Jets’) squaring off with another (albeit more recent) set of immigrants (‘Sharks’), and a love-struck couple caught tragically in the middle. … More West Side Story – Royal Exchange
Every generation harbours the misguided belief that it alone has truly discovered sex and that hitherto it was a purely functional affair. Rachel Mars kicks this myth resoundingly into touch in her new show Your Sexts are Sh*t: Older Better Letters. Indeed, juxtaposing sexts with steamy love letters dating back to the 18th century, Mars … More Your Sexts are Sh*t: Older, Better Letters – Royal Exchange Studio
“The barber shop is a lighthouse, a beacon … where men come to be men.” Barber Shop Chronicles is a wonderfully warm, vibrant and funky piece of theatre. Colourful and witty, with an irresistibly foot-tapping musical score, it nevertheless manages to probe some really dark and thorny issues around masculinity, relationships, culture, language and politics. … More Barber Shop Chronicles – Royal Exchange (with Contact Theatre)
Director Emma Rice’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s Wise Children is a deliciously extravagant and bawdy celebration of all things theatrical. The many and various strands of Carter’s epic tale – spanning a hundred years of tragic and hilariously messy family relationships – are all woven together by the characters’ love of the stage, from dance-hall … More Wise Children – HOME
“If the war ends, I’ll be fucked!” says Mother Courage in Anna Jordan’s new adaptation of Brecht’s 1939 Mother Courage and Her Children. And this pretty much sums up the tone and message of the play: a gritty, profanity-rich treatise on war as a brutal, de-humanising capitalist enterprise benefiting the elite at the expense of … More Mother Courage and Her Children – Royal Exchange
1n 1998, Kenneth Alan Taylor directed A Different Way Home at Oldham Coliseum, with Roy Barraclough taking on the challenge of playing the two siblings, Leslie and Maureen. Taylor reports loving the play from the moment he first saw the television version. Bringing it back to his home theatre twenty one years later and playing … More A Different Way Home – Oldham Coliseum
