We were outside Nexus Art Café in the Northern Quarter, queuing, when a car raced up, the driver shoved a woman to the pavement and the performance began. This was the introduction to the character Aggie in A Dream Play by the Déjà Vu Ensemble, daughter of the gods, who has come to our world to learn what it means to be human.
Under Manc Wood is an hour-long ode to the city of Manchester, adapted from Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. It plays homage to its precursor, reworking and including the poetry of the original while avoiding to simply superimpose Dylan’s play onto a Manchester setting.
Jokes come thick and fast in Chris Brown’s knockabout comedy The Messiah, a day in the life of an aggressive and egomaniacal knicker factory manager and the employees that suffer him. Brown stars as Mr. Kitson, the deluded ‘puppet-master’ whose bile and bravado thinly mask his internal fluster and frustration.
A show entitled Women Who Wank would never be intended to not to attract your attention. The one-woman show by improv performer and one half of FoolSize Theatre Joanne Tremarco promised to be “comical” and “tragical”, and didn’t fail to deliver both in equal measures.
Comedy sketch show Perverted Moves in the Dark is unafraid of offending and takes every opportunity to be as riotously sexual as possible. The show at the Three Minute Theatre at Affleck’s Palace, written by Sharon Heywood and Amir Rahimzadeh, is at its funniest when it introduces bizarre juxtapositions.
If you could live forever, would you? That is the central question posed by the 24:7 production The Young, written by Abi Hynes and showing at 2022NQ. The issues dealt with are (excuse the pun) age-old ones: what happens when we lose our youth, would you want to live forever and are youth and beauty one and the same?
MULE reviews Vienna, a play by Nowt Part Of Festival’s artistic director, Mike Francis Carvalho.
