On a clean, largely clear stage, dotted with a few barrels and benches, a tidy vegetable stand to one side and a pub sign, The Four Bears, to the other, a stormy sky lours menacingly at us, cradling a high, full moon at its corner. Cambridge University Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s Ruddigore starts as it…
We tend to think of Victorian society as morally strict, judgemental, and socially tense: and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, while confirming all the above, savagely pokes fun at Victorian ideals of social and moral perfection, pushing stereotypes to extremes in order to satirise the question of private and public goodness from all sorts of different…
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is a children’s novel, rather than a play: accordingly, the Maddermarket’s Christmas staging, using an adaptation of Joan Aiken’s book by Russ Tunney, keeps our mind firmly on the physicality of the original book, with a huge open volume taking centre stage at all times. Some characters literally emerge from…
Before the glitzy, transient landscape of Fake News, we had the sinister reign of “alternative facts.” Dario Fo’s sardonic, wisecracking black farce, performed at the Sewell Barn Theatre in Gavin Richards’ fast-paced, swearword-strewn English adaptation (as approved by Fo himself) finds three Italian policemen frantically trying to get their story right after an anarchist they…