I haven’t reviewed for quite some time - not because I’ve fallen out of love with theatre, but because sometimes life just gets in the way. But I can still be found in the stalls, programme in hand and a glass of wine or gin...
It’s where Shakespeare debuted Twelfth Night, and fellow literary legend and author of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, studied law, but so spectacular is Middle Temple Hall that it doesn’t even need to mention these credentials to be considered a breathtaking venue; rather, its Elizabethan...
The festive season is finally upon us, the change in season heralded by smell of mince pies, the taste mulled wine, and the sound of pantomime emanating from almost every theatre. But this year, instead of spending December taking my normal dive headfirst into a...
When hit crime author Gily Jacoby ends up fighting the inevitable descent into writers' block, she has a reputation to maintain, desperate for The Bloody Life of Ponton to become another bestseller. But what if that inspiration comes at a cost? In Faustaff or the...
Welcome to Applehurst, a town so mundane it would make your journey to work look like a rollercoaster of emotion. With highlights including Mrs Someone from down the road suffering a chest infection, and Mr Someone Else confiding in Sister George about his deepest fears,...
Why that and not this? It’s one heck of a question, a question with infinite interpretations and infinite answers. You could ask me “why that and not this” at 9am on a Monday and I’d say something entirely different to whatever I’d come out with...
The last 3 years have seen quite the resurgence in popularity of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, buoyed by the blockbusting Baz Luhrmann movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. It was 2013 and ’14's theme of the moment, trickling down from...
If you asked most parents how far they would go to secure the safety of their children, almost all would say they’d do “pretty much anything.” So what if that “anything” involved going to live in an underground bunker, cut off from the world with...
The memory of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic is one synonymous with the sight of towering pyres across the countryside, great thunderclouds of smoke billowing from piles of burning cattle. It’s an image most will never forget, even if only witnessed on TV, livestock...
In a military hospital just outside Agincourt, France, British soldiers, exhausted, injured and caked in mud, sit alongside French comrades as nurses tend to their wounds. It's a surprising opening to a play centred on one of England’s most celebrated military victories against the French,...