Issue 19 - 2005
Prompt Corner 
Prostrate apologies to begin with. In this column last issue, I berated the Financial Times for printing so few reviews of late in its UK edition. The guilty party was, in fact, Theatre Record, for failing to spot Alastair Macaulay's reviews of both A Few Good Men and Huis Clos in the paper's September 9th issue. You'd think I'd have learnt my lesson after fulminating at the beginning of the year over the absence of reviews of the beleaguered Birmingham production of Behzti, only to be shortly afterwards pointed towards Sam Marlowe's Times piece. On that occasion, though, the review appeared only in some editions, not including the one that passed across TR's cutting desk; the FT's editions structure is such that Alastair's reviews appeared throughout the UK, and there's no excuse for having failed to spot them. I'm deeply sorry to have kvetched so ostentatiously about something that was in fact my own fault. Alastair's pair of reviews lead off the "more on previous productions" section of this issue. (Apologies also, while I'm at it, to Rebecca Tyrrel of the Sunday Telegraph, who became Tyrrell in last issue's review headers.)
The FT didn't have time to run Alastair's review of On The Ceiling before it closed, though (with no disrespect to Mr Macaulay) there's little need for one more record of so thoroughly overstretched and disappointing a show. Nigel Planer's writing wore his research on its sleeve, right down to making his protagonists two genuine historical figures from the supporting cast of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel undertaking. This repeated parading of knowledge sat uneasily with the one idea behind the play, that of presenting these Renaissance artisans in modern demotic - the characters may have had the status of a Michelangelesque Rosencrantz & Guildenstern in Stoppard's play, but they sounded like Pete & Dud in The Dagenham Dialogues. Only without most of the humour. More than enough said.
Stupefaction
As misfires go, however, nothing in London at the moment can beat David Mamet's Romance. The reviews reprinted here are poor enough, but to get the full flavour of its reception you should visit www.theatrevoice.com and listen to David Benedict, Charles Spencer and Matt Wolf in discussion with Mark Shenton on the play. Charlie: "It's a much, much better production [than the play was given for its New York premiere]; it's still shit."
It's difficult to exaggerate the stupefaction on press night, the incredulity that Mamet could turn out anything this bad. Where Oleanna took a scalpel to ideas of political correctness, Romance knocks them around with a big inflatable shillelagh. Maybe it's a matter of cultural difference. Britain never quite had the broad burlesquing tradition of America ( "burlesque" in the sense of that particular kind of parody rather than that of ecdysiasm... although, sure enough, the judge does do some stripping in Romance). Moreover, as I've noted before, the UK has never suffered anything like the PC strictures of the States, and so all the grotesque cartoonish attitudes on show here lack a satirical element for us: we laugh at the gags, but feel nothing behind them. The result is that, without this spice of satire, it feels like the crassest kind of 1970s TV sitcom - Love Thy Neighbour, or Mind Your Language, where being different was in itself a cause for derision. And I fear that much of the laughter (as it built slowly from a stunned silence) may have been of that kind as well: not laughter in scorn of the attitudes being lampooned, but rather at the gags cracked from within those attitudes - the easier laughter, too, of an audience that wasn't at all having any of its preconceptions threatened... except for the one about Mamet being a consistently decent writer.
Mamet fairly evidently wanted to confound expectations by writing something very different from his normal fare. Oddly, I'm reminded of Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed's 1975 double album that consisted entirely of feedback. Reed wanted to confront his audience's expectations too. But, like Mamet here, he did so with a load of rubbish that seems to treat the audience with contempt. And that, forgive me, is not politic.
Ineffectual
A little more surprising is the relatively easy ride given to Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years. Again, the Theatrevoice discussion is instructive, with the panel speculating more openly that on this occasion perhaps Leigh simply turned out to be a prisoner of his devising process: that, relatively late in the (blissful!) 18-week rehearsal process, he may have realised that things simply weren't going to come together in prime dramatic shape, and so had to go with what he and his company had fashioned up to that point, and turn it into as finished a script as possible. This would also explain the cancellation of some early previews.
I maintain that if this show had been seen at, say, the Hampstead Theatre, playing to respectable but not packed houses and written by a half-known playwright, it would have received reviews to match. Those reviews would have said that the play is thoughtful and occasionally entertaining, but it's all talk and no action. Even within the domestic arena which is this play's focus, the debates about Jewishness seldom progress much deeper than the discussions of Middle Eastern and other wood events as reported in the Guardian to which the family subscribes. The only difference is that the conversations about son Josh taking up an observant, rather than his parents' secular, strain of Judaism are more impassioned; they're not inherently any more dramatic. (And by the way, several reviews mention the line "It's like having a Muslim in the house", but no-one picks up on what to me was the most evident characteristic of Josh's conversation with his parents: that it was conducted in exactly the mood, and with almost exactly the vocabulary, of classic coming-out conversations - all the bewildered, trying-to-understand-but-in-fact-faintly-distasteful questions such as how long have you felt this way and what do you actually, you know, do, struck me as hilarious when applied to religion rather than sex.) Those reviews would have said that, however trite the appearance of Samantha Spiro's self-obsessed sister may be, it makes for the only drama of the evening. They would have questioned the non-ending, which on the one hand shows a kind of reconciliation but on the other seems to imply that Josh has relapsed into his base state of ineffectual inactivity.
More worryingly, in the twelve years since his last stage work, and the twelve years since the one before that, it's just possible that Leigh may have lost the knack of structuring a play. Quentin Letts comes close to the nub when he says that Leigh "brings cinema tricks to the stage", but some of the tricks he seems to want to use won't translate. Between the numerous short scenes of the first act (the second is more continuous), Gary Yershon's atmospheric score plays through blackouts. These blackouts are at best excessive, at worst utterly unnecessary for scene changes on a single set such as is used here. What I think these interludes are meant to do is function like scene changes onscreen, when a few seconds without dialogue at the end of one scene will cut into the establishing shot of the next whilst the incidental music tootles away, providing tonal continuity. But without visuals to keep the flow going - with just the music playing to a darkened stage - the dramatic pace is crippled.
Exhortation
Many would say the same about the pace of both Playing With Fire and The Dragons' Trilogy. I disagree in both instances. Granted, David Edgar's play seems to switch from satire to Richard Norton-Taylor-style judicial reconstruction to dystopian drama, but the shifts are superficial. Nor is he targeting Blairism in particular with his tale of how a Whitehall wonk tries to overhaul a northern English city council by introducing diversity and accessibility targets and the like. The key is almost thrown away in a line from David Troughton's sly but ultimately principled council leader: when money and revenue sources are limited, he laments, the funding for initiatives to help the worst off must sometimes come from areas of benefit to all. Sometimes, in such situations, when folk feel they're losing out at others' benefit, it's because they actually are. But add the rhetoric of strident begrudgery, in an environment where too often multiculturalism means living alongside other communities rather than with them, and the brew becomes volatile. The play is not about a regime, but about our society; not an indictment, but a grim exhortation. And, for me, Edgar pulls off the achievement here as in, say, The Prisoner's Dilemma, of animating the big picture by following individuals as they try to find, or sometimes to cut, a path through the ideological thicket.
Reviews of The Dragons' Trilogy seem to use "soap opera" as a derogatory term. It's worth remembering not just that soap operas are the only regular form of dramatic engagement for many -perhaps most - of the country's population, but also that viewing figures show that soaps fall in popularity the more routinely overwrought they become. The soaps that are jam-packed from beginning to end with high-tension, improbable events are the ones that bum out their audiences. Ordinary events, such as in much of Robert Lepage's play cycle, are fine. So what else might be meant by the term in this context? That it goes on a bit? Oh, come on, five and half hours (with three commercial breaks) is trivial compared to, say The Warp. Even comedy is discovering the marathon: on this year's Edinburgh Fringe, comedian Mark Watson covered the entire Anno Domini era in performance at the rate of one minute per year: 2005 minutes, some thirty-three and a half hours.
That said, I must admit that this presentation felt somehow colder than the work's 1991 Riverside outing. I remember that as being a more intimate affair; remaking the Barbican Theatre into a massive traverse hangar accommodates the playas spectacle, but distances us from being able to feel the story as an organism. (This reconfiguration of the space for works in the Young Genius strand subsequently proved catastrophic for The Knight Of The Burning Pestle: see next issue.)
Unlikeable
And coldness seemed to be the keynote of Daniel Kramer's reimagination of Hair at the Gate. Kramer has written of wanting to reinvigorate the show as the political challenge it represented in 1968, but- leaving aside the specific updates of Bush and Condy, Abu Ghraib etc. - that challenge had power because it also embodied some kind of hope, even in the ironic finale of "Let The Sunshine In" sung over the body of the dead Claude. Without hope, there is simply confrontation. Without a specific tribal ethos such as hippiedom offered, the young people in Kramer's production are shrill, unlikeable attention-seekers. Indeed, without a single dominant youth tribe, he has to resort to a diversity of looks, of quiffs, cuts and shaves as all these young folk sing about how proud they are of the long hair that not one of them is sporting. The title number contains a few bars of Star Spangled Banner parody: "Oh, say, can you see/My eyes? If you can/Then my hair's too short!" Without such an emblem, the song becomes as much gibberish as the "Tooby ooby walla/Nooby abba naba" of "Good Morning Starshine". And without the viable alternative that hippiedom seemed at least briefly to offer, the story of this musical simply becomes a struggle between competing generational unpleasantnesses. There has to be a promise of sunshine in order for us to let it in.
At the Back
Can You Hear Me At BITEF?
Now in its 39th edition, the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, known to all as BITEF, has a long and distinguished history. A glance at the list of award winners (for it is a competitive festival) is like reading the chapter headings of a history of avant-garde theatre, not just in Europe but across the world.
Reversion
IR this year's BITEF, dance and movement predominated over more traditional theatre forms, a reflection perhaps of the move away from text that seems to be driving theatre thinking today. Its slogan, "Towards the fairy tale - and back", was an indirect homage to Hans Christian Andersen's bicentenary but more directly a pointer to the element of play and reversion to childhood that characterised many of its shows. Some were arrestingly childlike in the force of their naïve simplicity; others were merely childish in their look-at-me attention seeking.
Rami Be'er's Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company opened proceedings with a large scale piece, Foramen Magnum, which showed off the physical talents of his company well. Childish needs were served by having much of the early action take place inside a transparent "bouncy castle"; later it matures on to a large inflatable mattress, on which a delicately erotic duet was played out. Around these, the large corps de ballet occupied itself with a set of curious collapsible wooden props, used sometimes for ploughing and sometimes as beach chairs. Some imaginative dance was not well served by lighting which made it difficult to watch the dancers' feet, ugly costumes which hampered their movement, and a constantly jarring choice of ill-assorted music which ranged from Dowland to "Send in the Clowns".
Heiner Goebbels brought us the delightful Eraritjaritjaka, seen in Edinburgh last year, a child's jeu d'esprit with pretentious adult overtones in the shape of quotations form the notebooks of Elias Canetti, sonorously delivered by the actor André Wilms. The piece offers so much to enjoy, from a full-scale chamber concert by the on-stage Mondriaan String Quartet, through Wilms' endearing performance, modulated by a tour de force of hand-held camera work which apparently takes Wilms out of the theatre to a nearby apartment, where he is seamlessly joined by the musicians. The action in the apartment is projected on to the cutout wall of a large house at the back of the stage, a blow-up of a tiny doll's house which stands in front of it, and much of the audience's entrancement comes from trying to guess how the video image is achieved. Canetti's meditations on how we see ourselves from different imaginative viewpoints are put in the shade by the fascinating actual demonstrations of different ways of seeing which Goebbels and his video-musical team present.
Hommage
Eugenio Barba's Odin Theatre, long-time visitors to BITEF and now in their 41st year, offered an elaborate hommage in Andersen's Dream, a curiously disjointed collection of theatrical tricks for which they had constructed their own amphitheatre, its floor fake snow, its ceiling giant mirrors. It was frankly embarrassing to, watch this group of ageing hippies (who don't seem to have learned much about acting in their 41 years) indulge themselves in childish pursuits, speaking now in English, now in Danish, with occasional excursions into Spanish, since the piece was apparently intended to make a worthy political point by linking Andersen's society with the slave society of Latin America. No less embarrassingly, the link was achieved by putting black "voodoo" masks on the cast from time to time, and introducing a young, token black victim who was understandably bemused by the party games going on around him.
After this farrago it was a relief to find unadorned theatricality in Diego de Brea's staging of Marlowe's Edward II for the Slovenian National Theatre, Ljubljana. Eschewing scenery apart from a couple of chairs, de Brea gave his actors the whole depth of the Belgrade National Theatre's stage, from thrust forestage to scene dock, lit by some dramatic shafts worthy of Mark Henderson. Time and again de Brea's heavily choreographed direction achieved magnificent stage pictures. Drastic cutting of subsidiary characters and plotlines focussed our attention on the king's affair with Gaveston and their struggle with the principal plotters, joined by an icy Queen Isabella. Unfortunately, the director had also instructed his cast to overplay to the hilt, with a neurotic Mortimer emoting all over the floor and the gay lovers capering all over the place, at one point dancing right upstage in a faithful (if unconscious) imitation of Morecambe and Wise. Edward's death, too, lost some of its pathos, since his murderer, Lightborn, had already nailed him, supine, to a table: after this explicit horror, a single red light left us to imagine his fate.
Trash
From the Volksbahne in Berlin came a typical piece of trash theatre, juvenile rather than childish, from Rene Pollesch, Pablo In Der Plusfiliale. Performed in a set of containers ranged like fairground booths around a bar, this too relied heavily on handheld video: its microphone-toting performers only occasionally came off-camera to conduct a mock auction of third world white goods, sing third-rate karaoke and above all to rail in person at globalisation, exploitation and neo-liberalism or simply defend their right to their own sexuality. Deliberately anti-theatrical, Pollesch's performers spent most of their time shouting, with a few very welcome whispered interludes. The Belgrade audience loved it, in spite of sitting in a quagmire. Those with experience of the even more provocative Rodrigo Garcia's treatment of similar themes were less excited. At least the subtitles enabled the student of Serbian to learn the local word for Scheiße. The Swiss trio Metzger/Zimmerman/de Perrot had erected a high, plywood wall, which tracked back and forth, opening at unexpected points like an advent calendar, to allow them to perform Janei, a curious mix of dance, slapstick and minor circus tricks. Music came from DJ Dimitri de Perrot, trundling his decks around the stage or scratching them feverishly in an eyrie on the wall, while most of the action was supplied by the dancer Gregor Metzger and circus-trained Martin Zimmerman. The lack of real invention, of any scenic colour and of a perceptible programme reduced the effectiveness of what was a harmless enough entertainment. The average child would have enjoyed it, but might reasonably have expected something more.
Second Childhood
Second childhood was the theme of Alvis Hermanis' Long Life. Its setting is a series of cluttered rooms off a single corridor in a manifestly warden-unassisted home for the elderly. Here two couples and a singleton struggle wordlessly against heavy physical odds to retain their dignity and get through the day. Watching them go about their survival games produces mixed feelings. At first audience laughter is stifled in the face of their obvious pain, but by the end of two hours we can laugh with them, not at them, and share completely in what has become a celebration of the sheer joy of being alive. Performed by five remarkable young actors from his New Theatre of Riga, who " totally inhabit the failing bodies of their characters without even a smear of make-up, the piece can seem no more than a detailed piece of social realism. A closer look reveals some of the considerable technical skill behind it. The carefully graded lighting states are achieved by the lamps available in the home. The very sophisticated sound score emerges from the battered Casio keyboard rescued from some car-boot sale by one of the characters. An astonishing array of props is expertly but unobtrusively manipulated, to manipulate us in turn. It was as if some of the themes sketched in Complicité's early work on death and ageing have been refined to the highest level of theatre art.
Heavy
Two home-grown productions followed. The Croatian choreographer Stasa Zurovac had the interesting idea of making a ballet for the Belgrade National Ballet from the celebrated 1980 film Who's That Singing Over There, with a script by Dusan Kovacevic, an international cult hit which recounts the often comic trials of a busload of Serbs trying to get to Belgrade at the time of the Nazi take-over of their country in 1941. Zurovac's dance translation is a piece which in spite of its universal themes is likely to appeal more to the local audience than outside - indeed it has been recognised with several Serbian awards. The male corps de ballet in particular seized its opportunities in some Balkan dancing
to Vojislav Voki Kostic's lively score. Some rather heavy symbolism - the Nazi threat comes from a Bob Fosse chorus girl in a Gestapo hat - gets in the way of the childlike spirit of celebration that marks most of the action before its inevitably tragic conclusion.
In the second Belgrade show, young director Bojan Dordev was given the opportunity to show his talents in his adaptation of a piece by the Swiss playwright Robert Walser, No Name: Snow White. Any attempt at criticism of this self-indulgent parade must give way to the author's own authoritative programme note, from which a brief excerpt may suffice: "Here is a proposition of a queer form in theatre: neoclassical post-dramatic performance... We offer you a drawing room drama, a storm in a teacup, utterly two-dimensional, in which figures of speech are more important than anything else." Exactly.
It has to be admitted that Dordev's extraordinarily tedious production was performed with great style and total conviction by some fine actors on an elegant set. But the evening's arid exercise in deconstructing a fairy tale (Grimm rather than Disney, with not a dwarf in sight) offered not the slightest involvement, intellectual or emotional, for its surprisingly patient audience.
Unaffected
A total frankness, that of the unaffected child, pervades Anne Teresa de Keersmaker's danced solo Once, which was seen in London in 2003. As with Long Life, it could be easy to miss the subtleties of what seems a very simple piece: de Keersmaker, after a considerable time spent sizing up her audience and preparing her body to face it, plays a live recording made by Joan Baez in the sixties, matching its moods with her movement. Baez's anti-war lyrics now seem to make a quite strident comparison between Richard M Nixon and George W Bush's disastrous war campaigns, although the piece was made before the Iraq adventure. At one point the harsher voice of Bob Dylan takes over from Baez's crystal clear soprano, as video footage shows scenes of combat and carnage. The piece, however, has greater depths. In returning to the music of her youth, unsupported by her Rosas company, de Keersmaker offers an intimate, confessional demonstration of what moves her
personally, and expresses it in an unadorned exposure of her innermost thoughts and feelings, all brought to us by the most minimal, almost introvert use of her wonderfully supple dance technique. Baring her breasts at the end of an hour's close-up contact with her audience, she is not making any cheap erotic statement: she is baring her soul.
Fulfilment
There is a childish delight in the power of dance that shines through Lloyd Newson's latest work for DV8, Just For Show. His nine actor-dancers move easily from the stage into the audience, enticing and seducing them. Theirs is a just-for-show world of fake glamour, of glossy, empty personalities exemplified by Tanja Liedtke, who introduces the performance in the best showbiz manner only to be carried unceremoniously around the stage as if she were a cardboard cut-out. It's a very funny show, which manages to encompass yoga, magic, camp bitchery, the selling of tee shirts and a whole series of false endings in its hour's length. Yet once again the childish humour - some of it almost too childish - masks a deeper intent. These dancers are looking for fulfilment, for reality below the superficial show, and their search is danced out in some vividly erotic, painfully unfulfilled scenes between the moments of razzmatazz. The sharp contrast between desire and pursuit is beautifully illustrated by effortless transitions between film (Niall Black) and live action, with Jack Thompson's lighting an essential component. Personal lives are painfully revealed, and behind it all we sense the uncertainty, the self-questioning that must govern the all-too-short life of the professional dancer. In November, Just For Show plays a (correspondingly all too short) season at the National Theatre.
The final performance of the Festival was Douar, a lively demonstration of hip-hop and breakdancing from Accrorap, a group of Algerian emigres based in Besancon. These street kids are young men now, but they retain that divided desire to be part of the pack yet respected within it that powers any schoolyard gang. Apart from a final, surprising salute to the memory of Yasser Arafat, theirs was an exuberantly mindless barrier-crossing salute to the sheer power of movement which in so many different ways has characterised this 39th BITEF.
Showcase
Alongside the official
programme, this year's Festival offered workshops, colloquia and a
showcase programme intended to give some of the flavour of what is
going on in Serbian theatre today. To judge from some of the shows,
young Serbs have the same obsession with the mysteries and possibilities
of sex as young people anywhere else, expressed in plays as tentative
and incomplete as many actual first experiences of it. There were competent
presentations of two American works, Woody Allen's Death and Who's Afraid
Of Virginia Woolf? as well as a well staged local attempt to examine
the life and songs of Billie Holiday. I was glad to revisit Alex Chisholm's
production of Ugliesa Saitinac's Huddersfield, this time with
surtitles, which enabled me to confirm that it is a very strong, if
hardly groundbreaking, treatment of the disillusion of the thirty-something
generation. And one production on this Fringe was almost worthy of
promotion to the main programme: the experienced Romanian director
Gabor Tompa had worked with a young group of Hungarian-speaking actors
from Novi Sad to produce Medea's Circles, a reworking
of Euripides which stripped away the text without losing any of the
power of the original, expressing tragedy through some of its ancient
cries of woe, combined with sure-footed movement from protagonists
and chorus who remained, circling, on stage throughout.
Ian Herbert :ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
AFTER THE END New play by Dennis Kelly |
Bush |
14 Sep |
8 Oct |
1185 |
AFTERBIRTH New play by Dave Florez |
Arcola |
15 Sep |
1 Oct |
1165 |
AMY EVANS' STRIKE Revised revival of play by John Finnemore (Activated Image) |
Courtyard at Covent Garden |
14 Sep |
9 Oct |
1191 |
THE COLOUR OF POPPIES Return of adaptation of novel La femme coquelicot by Node Châtelet |
New End |
14 Sep |
9 Oct |
1157 |
CROCODILE SEEKING REFUGE New play by Sonja Linden (lceandfire) |
Lyric Studio |
22 Sep |
8 Oct |
1186 |
THE DRAGONS TRILOGY Revival of play by Robert Lepage et al. (Barbican/Young Vic/Ex Machina) |
Barbican |
16 Sep |
25 Sep |
1178 |
FEWER EMERGENCIES New play by Martin Crimp |
Royal Court Upstairs |
12 Sep |
1 Oct |
1146 |
HAIR Revival of musical by Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, James Rado |
Gate |
22 Sep |
29 Oct |
1187 |
HOXTON STORY New promenade piece devised by Lisa Goldman |
Walkabout performance |
10 Sep |
17 Sep |
1177 |
JOURNEYS END Return of revival of play by R.C. Sherriff |
New Ambassadors |
22 Sep |
1192 |
|
ME AND MICHAEL: A MOTORWAY TALE New play by Robert Meakin (Bowman Prods) |
Old Red Lion |
13 Sep |
1 Oct |
1151 |
NATHAN THE WISE Revival of play by G E Lessing, in new translation by Edward Kemp |
Hampstead |
19 Sep |
15 Oct |
1182 |
ON THE CEILING New play by Nigel Planer |
Garrick |
12 Sep |
1 Oct |
1148 |
ONYSOS THE WILD New play by Laurent Gaude |
Theatre 503 |
14 Sep |
25 Sep |
1181 |
OPEN HOUSE Site-specific revival of play by Helena Thompson |
Kensal House |
23 Sep |
30 Oct |
1147 |
THE PHILANTHROPIST Revival of play by Christopher Hampton |
Donmar |
13 Sep |
15 Oct |
1152 |
PLAYING WITH FIRE New play by David Edgar |
Olivier |
21 Sep |
22 Oct |
1172 |
ROMANCE New play by David Mamet |
Almeida |
14 Sep |
22 Oct |
1158 |
TAKE TWO New play by Jonathan Mantle and Emmeline Winterbotham (Paper Kite) |
Upstairs at the Gatehouse |
20 Sep |
1 Oct |
1157 |
TWO THOUSAND YEARS New play by Mike Leigh (NT) |
Cottesloe |
15 Sep |
31 Jan |
1166 |
WOLVES AND SHEEP Revival of play by Alexander Ostrovsky (Escapade Th) |
Pleasance |
16 Sep |
2 Oct |
1191 |
Regions |
||||
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST Revival of play by Dario Fo in new version by Joe Farrell |
Glasgow, Citizens |
14 Sep |
17 Sep |
1200 |
AS YOU LIKE IT Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
17 Sep |
15 Oct |
1201 |
CROWHURST New play by John Harvey (Benchtours) |
Glasgow, Tron |
8 Sep |
10 Sep |
1200 |
HAMLET Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Basingstoke, Haymarket |
19 Sep |
8 Oct |
1198 |
HOUSE and GARDEN Revival of plays by Alan Ayckboum |
Harrogate |
22 Sep |
8 Oct |
1198 |
I JUST STOPPED BY TO SEE THE MAN Revival of play by Stephen Jeffreys |
Bolton, Octagon |
23 Sep |
15 Oct |
1199 |
THE MEMORY OF WATER Revival of play by Shelagh Stephenson |
Watford Palace |
20 Sep |
8 Oct |
1197 |
MY OLD MAN New play by Tom McGrath (Magnetic North TC) |
Glasgow, Tron |
22 Sep |
1 Oct |
1202 |
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
12 Sep |
22 Oct |
1195 |
THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL Revival of play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Northern Broadsides) |
Halifax, Viaduct |
14 Sep |
17 Sep |
1196 |
SEPARATE TABLES Revival of plays by Terence Rattigan |
Reading, Mill at Sonning |
20 Sep |
15 Oct |
1196 |
SUGAR Revival of musical by Jule Styne based on screenplay Some Like it Hot |
Ipswich, New Wolsey |
20 Sep |
8 Oct |
1199 |
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Leeds, WYP Quarry |
21 Sep |
22 Oct |
1197 |