Reviews

Austin Pendleton is an American actor, director and playwright who has a vast experience in both stage and film across a variety of genres – with a variety of actors, some of them very famous. That sort of experience informs this play, first performed in Chicago in 2000, where he brings together two great stars of stage and screen – Orson Welles and Sir Laurence Olivier – and their egos and vulnerabilities.

The war is over, Prohibition is in full force, and no-one is quite who they seem in this comedy set in an American Speakeasy of the Roaring Twenties. Blackwood Players have gone all out to present a play loosely inspired by the 1921 song of the same name.

Co-directed by the playwright Sue Oldknow, and Michelle Maclean, it’s a light-hearted song-and-dance story of the onstage and backstage relationships between flappers new and fading, wannabe Hollywood starlets, and gangsters who are more bluff and fluff than substance.

A forensic analysis of a family with a history of suicide is difficult subject matter. But at a time when mental health is foremost in our minds, Metro Arts has taken up the challenge to deal with difficult subject matter. Anatomy of a Suicide by award-winning British writer, Alice Birch, is a trio of plays in one. It deals boldly with themes of mental illness, the pressures of motherhood, post-natal depression, drug use, sexuality and suburbia by spinning three interweaving stories with three central female characters.

Vanessa Bates' play opens up a dialogue on very sensitive issues. She has the ability to address the problems that infertility can cause in relationships with humour, sensitivity and candour. The script is taut and incisive, leaving little room to be trite or clichéd.