Arts and Entertainment Archive

I wondered how this trilogy would hold up in 2018, in the midst of #MeToo and changed sensibilities, but I am happy to report that Alan Ayckbourn’s Table Manners, in the very capable hands of director Mark Kilmurry and an exceedingly fine …

After eight years of development hell and production drama, the movie Queen fans have been waiting for has finally arrived. Is it a killer flick or does it bite the dust? The answer is unequivocal: If you want to have a good time, check out Bohemian …

A group of blokes in dark suits sit around discussing art. They look ordinary enough. You might overhear them talking in a café. To varying degrees they have some knowledge, although it becomes clear they don’t like cubism, surrealism – all modern …

Playwright Melissa Reeves has taken the protagonist first imagined by Henrik Ibsen in his An Enemy of the People and turned his Dr Stockman into a her and placed her into the 21st century in a small town in Australia, in which …

Fast, funny, refreshing and poignant – Feather in the Web is all this and more. It’s also unpredictable, original and downright entertaining, and its cast of four are uniformly and individually fabulous. A black comedy that is both weird and wonderful, what …

The Merchant of Venice With standout performances in the key roles of Portia and Shylock, as well as those of Bassiano, Lorenzo and Jessica, this is a memorable Merchant of Venice and – as has proved normal with the three plays I …

What to make of Eva Peron? Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s bio musical of the former Argentine First Lady doesn’t answer the question (far too hard, would take far too long!) and lets the adulating crowds, the cynical narrator Che and …

In a world of ‘fake news’, rotating prime ministers and scandals of all kinds, Dario Fo’s 1969 comedy about corruption is as relevant as ever. Here, in the able hands of director Sarah Giles, it is presented as pure farce and is …

Life wasn’t meant to be easy, and there’s certainly a lot of unease in this tale. Two 19-year-olds, incapable of looking after themselves, have a baby. The authorities step in, led by a veteran social worker, and declare neglect (always a potentially …

If Stephen Karam didn’t have Tolstoy’s famous phrase “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” in his head when he was writing The Humans, then he missed a trick. Because this family of humans is exceedingly unhappy, each one of …