Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
A night at the theatre can mean many different things to different people. To educate, to entertain, to allow a sarcastic monkey the reason to be adored are perhaps just three out of a multitude of reasons that the crowd who piled in with beaming faces and who left the Playhouse Theatre in a state of comedy fulfilment would have come to see and take part in.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Rob Castell, Nick Cavaliere, Tamzin Griffin, Sinead Matthews, Joseph Timms, David Webber, Tim Lewis, Simon Dormandy.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts…well not quite absolutely, especially when Time and the clockman are on your side.
However fleeting Time is, when naked ambition and naivety meet corporate greed and rank stupidity, Time is not adverse to having a laugh at the expense of the system so proudly held up as the shining beacon in which to chase a profit is seen as good. To knock someone the moment they have delivered that fortune seen as even better and in which some boardrooms up and down the country of late have saw fit to rival. It only takes one man though to make a mockery of it and The Hudsucker Proxy is born.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Edmund Wiseman, Emily Bowker, Selma Brook, Max Bowden, Cloudia Swann, Peter Duncan, Emily Altneu, James Staddon, Liam McCormick, Roger Martin, Alastair Whatley, James Findlay.
Even in the foul grip of war, there must be a love that carries the soldier across the boundary between the stench of perpetual death and the sanity that is provided by having something to live for. Love in the midst of war is what keeps the thoughts of ordinary men from turning into barbarians and for those who do the fighting, whether above ground, on the fields of No Man’s Land or in the tunnels, love can be the saving point. Love is a peculiar Birdsong.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Remmie Milner, Jamie Samuel.
It is a credit to the theatre attendees of Liverpool that there are writers of such great quality with a unique modern perspective out there who are willing to see their plays performed on the city’s various stages, that no matter how difficult the subject matter may be to perhaps take in, they know with hand on heart that the audiences will give every ounce of their concentration to and be thoughtful in their considered response. This is especially true when someone of the calibre of Ella Carmen Greenhill brings her play Plastic Figurines to the Playhouse Theatre Studio stage.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Helen Anderson, Lisa Bird, Eva Bell, Andrew Bone, Ed Brody, Phil Cheadle, Kit Lessner, Marianne Oldham, Robert Styles, Eleanor Thorn, Rosie Wyatt, Javez Cheeseman, Colby Mulgrew.
Some pieces of literature are perhaps arguably not intended to be envisigned in anything other than cinema’s light, some perhaps are so sensitive that to try and show that singular emotion on the stage is to invite crass remarks and tactlessness in return.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Reece Dinsdale, James Harkness, Cyril Nri, Maggie McCarthy, Amiera Darwish, Charlotte Lucas, Gyuri Sarossy, Theo Cowan, Barry McCarthy, Helen Ryan, Don Gallagher, Ekow Quartey.
History could have been so different but it is the joy of speculation that only makes the subject interesting, for the time the events take place, the winner and the loser are only remembered for being in the same race. It is up to the historians, the journalists and the playwrights to put flesh on the bones and the gloss of pallor of imagination on the cheeks of the long since departed. History though is not quite viewed in the same way when there is The Absence of War dictating the proceedings.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Dugald Bruce-Lockhart, Antonia Kinlay, Ravi Aujula, Séan Browne, Tom Davey, Lewis Collier.
The performance on the field of play is what sells newspapers and lights up the hope in a nation. It is though the commotion, the sometimes arrogant fuss and nail chewing excitement that goes on behind the scenes that captures the imagination and provides the truth behind the success and failure, the unbelievable high and the very desperate low which makes drama so fulfilling.
Educatibg Rita at the Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool. Photograph by Stephen Vaughan.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Leanne Best, Con O’Neill.
The further we move away from a time in history, the more it seems to resonate with us in the present. In 1979 the social climate of the country changed, events and news from around the world started to mould Britain in a way not seen since the start of the Second World War and the pace of life altered, stagnation, alienation and guilt in some quarters, not enough in others, became a new breeding ground to hit people with a terrifying new stick with. Yet somehow, as if in rebellion to this flowering want, great music started to reflect the times once more and the mood of education was to be heard in many a great rock and pop song and into this world Willy Russell’s Educating Rita was born.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Catrin Aaron, David Birrell, Natalie Casey, Edward Harrison, Javier Marzan, Robin Morrissey, Eileen O, Brien, Lucy Phelps, Graeme Rooney, Voice of Ken Dodd.
History has a way of repeating itself, what goes round will no doubt come round again. It is the comfort in the despairing knowledge that for every action…the same mistakes will be played out, over and over again and the same fortitude shown in national absurdity relied upon. For those old enough to remember the period in which an inept leader of the country was finally shown the door and the nation stumbled upon the lost ideals of the Sexual Revolution, Stephen Sharkey’s Sex And The Three Day Week is an homage to the strife, internal conflict of repressed sexuality and people making the most of the black-outs.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Alan Price, Oliver Gomm, Howard Chadwick, Guy Lewis, Jon Trenchard, Andrew Whitehead, Robert Took, Gilly Tompkins, Hannah Edwards, Lauryn Redding, Alan McMahon.
The 18th Century was one of richness in the field of theatre. By the time Oliver Goldsmith’s play, She Stoops To Conquer, had been performed for its debut performance the sight of women acting on the stage was so commonplace that it was an absurdity to have been forbidden from performing in the first place. There had been so many plays that had benefited from King Charles II proclamation a century before, so many talented writers getting more emotion from a finished piece and so many gifted women being rightly lauded that it the art of the Comedy of Manners took off in such a way and perhaps no more so than in the fantastic She Stoops To Conquer.