Month: October 2023

The latest instalment in HER Productions’ Vignettes features some changes. The venue has moved from Hope Mill to Contact and, more significantly, the plays have a unifying theme: marking the 45th anniversary of the Greater Manchester Rape Crisis (GMRC) centre and being inspired by stories from the centre. As GMRC is a women-led, women-only service,… Continue reading Vignettes

In 2019 the Austrian composer Albin Fries announced he was giving up composing for good, gave away his piano, destroyed most of his CDs and threw out thousands of manuscript pages. It wasn’t the first time he had thrown his pen out of the pram. He did the same thing in 1985, claiming his music… Continue reading Persinette

Giachino Rossini, who boasted he could set a laundry list to music, wrote nearly forty operas. ll Turco in Italia, an early opera buffa, dates from 1814 when he was 22 years old. Directed by Laurent Pelly, conducted by Giacomo Sagripanti and designed by Chantal Thomas, it gets a modern, suburban sitcom update with big… Continue reading ll Turco in Italia

This two-hander was John McKay’s first produced play, premièred at the Traverse in 1988 with a transfer to the Royal Court. Director Liz Carruthers now gives it a simple thrust staging with a single chair and a screen plastered with images of Margaret Thatcher and posters for The Smiths to remind us it takes place… Continue reading Dead Dad Dog

When a crewmate is lost at sea, as Alys Williams tells us at the outset of this one-woman show, there is a strict protocol to follow. Call “man overboard”. Blow the whistle. Phone the bridge. Point towards the lost soul. And keep pointing. From this simple set of instructions, Williams (debuting as a writer for… Continue reading The Light House

The video is a little fuzzy, the recording of the orchestra rather scratchy. Then the words break through: “Euridice… Euridice… Euridice,” not loud but somehow commanding. The voice is rich, velvety, something to wrap yourself in, that of Janet Baker in her signature role of Orfeo. This was her final operatic engagement, in Peter Hall’s… Continue reading Orfeo ed Euridice

The usual method used when staging autobiographical plays (determining one’s sexuality, reaching a turning point in life) is to perform a monologue. Katherina Radeva on the other hand uses dance to celebrate 40 years as a woman, a migrant and an artist; a particularly daring choice as, although she has always danced, she is not… Continue reading 40/40

This is three for the price of one and, as an offer, you will do worse than take it. Billed as being a new form of theatre—physical—using the facial expressions and bodies of our actors to tell their stories, it’s a night of intrigue and mystery which unravels pretty well. Each of our directors, Moira… Continue reading Wake Up

It is tempting to let the character Iago dominate the play Othello. He leads the action, shapes the tragedy and speaks aloud about his motives and intentions, sometimes even playing with the language. A few years back, Mark Rylance had audiences in stitches with an hilarious performance as Iago at the Globe. The Riverside production… Continue reading Othello

This thrilling dramatisation of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel owes so much to Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation and the creativity, imagination and collaboration of the whole production team. The opening scenes introduce us to teenager Pi Patel, his family and the zoo in Pondicherry, India which holds a number of ferocious wild animals, including a spotted hyena,… Continue reading Life of Pi