Out for Six
WriteFest 2023
17th Annual WriteFest
Progress Company at Progress Theatre, Reading until 30th September
Review by Nick Swyft
The 17th WriteFest event at Progress comprises six plays by Reading writers. Local writing groups are welcome to contribute, but if you see yourself as a playwright there is nothing to stop you either.
Read more…Hounds of Love
The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, adapted by John Nicholson and Steve Canny
Putney Theatre Company at the Putney Arts Theatre until 30th September
Review by Andrew Lawston
Dartmoor, lanterns flashing in the night, a man apparently walking on tiptoes to his death, “an enormous hound”, escaped convicts, the Grimpen Mire. The plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, has become archetypal, and endless adaptations on stage and screen have taken various liberties with the original text.
It’s something of a surprise then that Putney Theatre Company’s new production of Steve Canny and John Nicholson’s parody of the tale is, plotwise at least, a relatively faithful adaptation.
Read more…Consuming Passions
La Traviata : Preview
Instant Opera at Normansfield Theatre, Teddington, 6th to 8th October
Preview: Opera critic Thomas Forsythe discusses the forthcoming production of Verdi’s La Traviata with Instant Opera’s Artistic Director, Nicholas George
TF: Hello Nick. It is good to meet up with you again. Thank you for the opportunity once more to chat with you about Instant Opera’s latest production. This season, it is La Traviata Giuseppe Verdi’s perennial blockbuster. Yet, after the première in 1853, Verdi wrote “La traviata last night was a failure, “Was the fault mine … ?” He could not have been more overwhelmingly wrong as, year after year, La Traviata breaks records as the world’s most frequently performed opera. What is it, do you see, that gives this work its enduring appeal?
Read more…High Flyers
Swan Awards, 2022-23
Arts Richmond at the Landmark Arts Centre, Teddington
Eat your heart out, Oscars, for the Swans have come to roost again.
The Swan Awards for excellence in local theatre were first conferred in September 1986 for the best of non-commercial theatre in Richmond upon Thames during the 1985-86 season. A grand dinner dance was held in the Richmond Hill Hotel to announce the winners, who were each presented with a wooden Swan crafted by sculptor Lesley Beaumont. The event has taken place every year since.
Read more…Essential Operatic Viewing
The Mikado
Music by Arthur Sullivan, libretto by W.S Gilbert, adapted by John Savournin
Charles Court Opera at the Arcola Theatre until 23rd September
Review by Patrick Shorrock
This is the simply the best Mikado that I have seen. It even surpasses the famous Jonathan Miller ENO version at the Coliseum. G&S is a delicate plant that is easily killed if the performers betray the slightest awareness that they are funny or think that they can get away with bad singing. Sullivan’s music deserves – and rewards – the very best a singer can give, and gets it here in an excellent production that ensures that both the comedy and the music make the maximum possible impact. The Madrigal, in particular, is utterly captivating: dead in tune and beautifully sung.
Read more…Bath Etiquette
Persuasion
by Dawn Bush, adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
DOT Productions, Theatre at the Tabard, Chiswick until 7th October
Review by Claire Alexander
Persuasion is Jane Austen’s final (complete) novel and Austen experts (of which I am not) often say that Anne is one of her most mature, and reflective heroines.
Read more…Moor and More
Brontë, the Opera
by Lisa Logan, libretto based on the play by Polly Teale
Keynote Opera at the Arcola Theatre, part of the Grimeborn Festival, until 16th September
Review by Mark Aspen
Forget the windswept moors, the Yorkshire accents, the lumpen servants carrying lanthorns in the dark, for the Brontë sisters in Lisa Logan’s new opera inhabit another wild darkness, a Freudian world of their own psyches. The foreboding heathland is condensed into their father’s parsonage, where they are confined by the mores of the early Nineteenth Century.
It is perhaps therefore pertinent that the world première of Brontë, the Opera should take place in the Arcola Theatre, whose snug acting space emulates the claustrophobic ambience of Haworth rectory.
Charlotte, Emily and Anne are trapped with their own longings, for freedom, for love, for independence; trapped by social standing, by religious convention and by perceived propriety as women. Their inner escape is manifest via the twins of fantasy and poetry, forms of self-expression that were to blossom into some of the English language’s finest literature.
Read more…Cupid Caught in Web
Strategic Love Play
by Miriam Battye
Paines Plough at The Soho Theatre until 23rd September, then on tour until 21st October
Review by Brent Muirhouse
The staging of Strategic Love Play immediately plays a strong hand and invites the audience to study the awkwardness of first date realities in 2023 from a full 360 degrees. Much like a world filled with multitudes of algorithms attempting to match and pair couples, we analyse the habits, reactions, and subtleties of sentences of the two characters – here named simply as ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ – around which the play’s narrative quite literally revolves.
Read more…He’s My
About Bill
by Bernie Gaughan, music and lyrics by Matthew Strachan
Take Note at the Theatre at the Tabard, Chiswick until 9th September
Review by Claire Alexander
We never meet legendary trumpeter Bill Fitzgerald (fictitious it would seem – I can’t find him on google – but in the image of the memorable jazz musicians of the mid-twentieth Century), but his presence pervades the stage throughout the performance of About Bill. Written by Bernie Gaughan and music and lyrics by Matthew Strachan, it is an evocative and poignant musical drama of Bill’s life seen through the perspective of the many women in his life, from the schoolgirl crush, to the flawed romance with the recovering addict in his later years.
Most impressive is that Kim Ismay (for whom I understand the piece was written) plays all the women with absolute verve and versatility.
Read more…High Quality Ditchwater, But Still Dull
Céphale et Procris
Music by Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, libretto by Joseph-François Duché de Vancy
Ensemble OrQuesta at the Arcola Theatre, part of the Grimeborn Festival, until 2nd September
Review by Patrick Shorrock
Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was the first woman to write a French opera, which makes her a perfect candidate for Grimeborn. Her opera is certainly no worse than those written Rameau – and sometimes better – but there is no getting away from the fact that French opera at that time was pretty stiff and stilted. The libretto is dreadful, starting with an allegorical prologue in praise of Louis XIV and never recovering, as all the characters, whether divine or human, do everything in their power to thwart the love of Céphale and Procris. They eventually succeed by convincing each of the lovers that the other is unfaithful, with the result that he accidentally kills her with an arrow. Othello it ain’t.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 