Tennessee Williams’ view of humanity, in terms of dead-eyed, disillusioned despair, can give even Ibsen and Thomas Hardy (neither famed for their rosy-tinted outlook) a serious run for their money. Suddenly Last Summer is a horrible story, told by terrible people, about other, even more disgusting people and the revolting things they do to others…
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…
Crooked Wood began life as a TV play, Number 27, by Michael Palin (broadcast by the BBC in 1988). It’s basically the ultimate antidote to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: a deliciously English adventure of Machiavellian property developers floored by steely politeness, tidal waves of Earl Grey tea, and a calm, but firm, rebellion against…
J.R.R. Tolkien, among many other things, is famous for two: his unending ability to procrastinate, and his heated (and repeated) refusals that his work could (or should) be read allegorically. He dismissed those who looked for the mud of the Somme in the grim marshes on the borders of Mordor with cold contradiction; he may…
Onto a small stage, a jagged piece of wall with a gothic window to one side, and a raised, curtained platform on the other, walks Charles Dickens. He tells us – in his own voice, lifted virtually verbatim from the opening of The Old Curiosity Shop – of his nightly walks through the London streets,…
“A merman was caught at Orford in the thirteenth century, and kept for some time; he could not be induced to take an interest in the services of the church, nor indeed to speak; eventually he escaped. The authority is Ralph of Coggeshall.” This succinct account of the legend of the Wildman of Orford, by…
Bungay boasts several natural blessings when it comes to the arts. The town itself is of storybook prettiness; its Georgian theatre, sensitively restored in recent years, still has some original features excitingly intact from 1828: and Bungay’s ruined castle, meanwhile, dates back to 1173. Once the stronghold of Hugh Bigod, that rebellious Earl eventually had…
The Suffolk coast, though dotted with pastel-painted beach huts and gracious Edwardian esplanades, can also be unnervingly bleak – and eerie. So many East Anglian villages have slipped under the waves of the ever-encroaching North Sea, and many tell tales of ghostly church bells which toll beneath the tide, or once-proud manor houses now buried…
“On a small island, in the middle of the sea, a man meets a big bird…” Much Ado About Puffin tells a beguiling story of an unlikely, exciting friendship in a deliciously analogue world. A weatherbeaten seafaring man lives alone in a tiny cottage perched high on a steep cliff, with just his Roberts radio…
Even ruthless, psychotic gangsters have to fall in love sometimes. And Rodelinda is all about what happens when the people at the top of the cruel power pyramid have got their minds on… other things, like other people’s faithful wives, as well as their crime kingdoms. Director Richard Jones translates Rodelinda’s setting (originally 7th century Lombardy) to gangster warfare…