The 24:7 Theatre Festival runs until 1 August, showing an impressive range of fresh and young performances at the New Century House in Manchester. The plays are all short – catching the viewers’ attention for just an hour but making them want to come back for more. It’s the perfect way to spend the weekend, says Virginia Fernandez. Read more
Theatre Festival: Contacting the World
Manchester’s Contact Theatre is hosting Contacting the World, an international festival of theatrical arts, until 26 July. Virginia Fernandez spoke to the theatre’s Artistic Director, Baba Israel, about the project.
Theatre Review: Beautiful House
Few plays will try to marry the themes of ancient Egyptian mummification with the hostility of the housing market against a backdrop of terminal illness. Yet Beautiful House, the first theatre commission for Manchester-based playwright Cathy Crabb, shoehorns these vastly disparate ideas into a puzzlingly funny play.
Theatre Review: Why I Don’t Hate White People
The magnetic Lemn Sissay takes his audience on a journey that twists, turns and tramps across issues of race, political correctness and identity. In this solo show, the poet’s first for two years, Sissay assumes different characters so seamlessly that, at times, it feel as though there is a full cast on stage.
Theatre Review: 1984
George Orwell’s 1948 masterpiece novel has been adapted for stage and screen countless times. Despite the now-past title date, his portrayal of a dystopian, near-future world has a timeless resonance. Yet, in the case of the Royal Exchange’s latest production, the play suffers from being too-well known. Here, its familiar motifs are over-indulged.
Theatre Review: Ghost Boy
For 17-year-old, MC-ing drug dealer Jamal, life on the Lemonade Estate is tough; nowhere near as sweet as it sounds. Keith Saha’s Ghost Boy, now showing at Contact Theatre, sets a tale of knife crime and weed-fuelled paranoia to a beatboxed, hip hop score. Innovative lyrics and dance punctuate a script which attempts to balance [...]
Theatre Review: A Night on the Tiles
If Quentin Tarantino was a Mancunian drama teacher, A Night on the Tiles might be his breakthrough play. It is an audaciously scripted homage to Reservoir Dogs-inspired gangster posing and Kill Bill Vol.2 chop-socky, which balances humour, inventiveness and style.
Theatre Review: A Raisin in the Sun
What would you do with a life-changing sum of money? This is the pivotal question of Lorraine Hansberrys’ 1959 play and becomes the lens through which life in fifties America for a black family is starkly highlighted. The Royal Exchanges’ intimate theatre becomes the claustrophobic apartment in which three generations of the Younger family feud, [...]
Theatre Review: “No Wonder”
Library Theatre, showing as part of the Re:Play Festival 27 January 2010 No Wonder is the examination of a family disturbed by tragedy. The plot is littered with would-be fairy-tale circumstances; a young boy bursts out of what could be a magical cupboard and his father, dressed as Peter-Pan, appears to fall out of a window.
Music and theatre events to raise funds for Haiti
This weekend two Manchester arts venues are holding special nights to raise funds for the Disasters Emergency Committee HAITI Appeal.
Theatre Preview: Re:Play 2010 Season
Throughout the third annual Re:Play Season, new local writing which has already been premiered in non-traditional venues will be revived for another showing at The Library Theatre, bringing the work to new audiences. Spotlighting the best talent from festivals including 24:7, Re:Play is designed to encourage emerging local talents.
Cabaret Preview: Mother’s Ruin – Saturday 19 December
New queer cabaret-cum-variety Mother’s Ruin returns to greenroom for their third outing of the year with their alt take on the Christmas Special. Theirs is a 80s-tinged Yuletide Ding Dong, replete with shoulder pads, big hair (tantalisingly “available on the night”) and dragged up soap pastiche “Stark Dallas Naked”. Never has the description “Variety Show” [...]
Theatre Review: Contradictions at Contact Theatre
Propelled by the blistering, multi-role performance of writer-actor Ali Gadema, Contradictions takes the audience on a dark, intimate and occasionally distressing journey through early-1990s Manchester on the number 42 bus route.
Exodus Festival (Sunday 2nd August)
Manchester’s diverse art scene is one not to be sniffed at, especially when it reveals gems like the Exodus Festival, a unique celebration of arts and culture from Greater Manchester’s refugee communities.
Review: The Glass Menagerie
This superb rendition of Tennessee Williams account of the travails of working-class American life in the 1930s opened the Manchester Students Union Drama Festival. Across the water, Europe is a searing tinder-box; while against the backdrop of the Depression and changing values, a family engages in a moving and amusing battle against themselves and one [...]