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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
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, […]
