Reviews

Madness of Two is an innovative new theatre company, founded by theatre-makers Ellen Graham and Jamie Hornsby. In Starweaver, they are partnering with the State Theatre company and premiering a new piece of very high-quality science fiction performance with innovative staging and effects.

When this production was first conceived by Opera North in 2018, Donald Trump was in the White House and the #MeToo movement was a dominant cultural force,  which partly inspired the Director Edward Dick to give it a modern sensibility.

The story was transplanted from Rome during the Napoleonic wars to an unnamed present-day country where Church and State collude.

In one of the most striking parallels about powerful men behaving badly, the villain Scarpia sings about his desire to both bed Tosca and discard her after his prospective conquest.

Oliver! is a timeless musical that captures the essence of Charles Dickens's classic novel, Oliver Twist. Chances are you’ve seen it, been in it, directed it or produced it in no specific order. It’s a musical that has stood the test of time for its light and shadow, hope and hopelessness, for its look at the opulence and the underbelly of society.

Jean (Jess Waterhouse) has just finished her soup in a café when she loses patience with a man sitting nearby (Bruce Hardie) for failing to do anything about his continually ringing mobile phone. Then she realises he is dead. In her fluster, and evidently because she makes poor decisions on the spur of the moment, she answers the phone for him — and continues to do so, even pretending that she knew the dead man before he died. In the process of speaking for him, she learns that his name was Gordon.