Pilot Theatre have a track record of strength in so many areas. Their collaboration with Manjeet Mann in the latest of their young adult adaptations has once more pushed their achievements to perfection. In all of my theatre blog coverage, few groups have had such a long and consistently good run as Pilot Theatre. My equivalent to five stars is the Ike Award, which I first gave for an adaptation of The Season Ticket (co-produced with Northern Stage). The second one went to Noughts and Crosses, and that was the first in a series of adaptations of young adult novels that has been doing well. We ..read more

The play may be billed as politics, but the real story is the people behind the politics. It is this human story, not a soapbox, that makes Love If When We Beat Them a good start to Live’s anniversary programme. Sometimes, the fortunes of a play come to luck. Even if you’ve penned the greatest play in the world, you can struggle to get an audience if the topic’s not in fashion. A play set in 1996 with both the runaway success of Newcastle United and runaway success of Labour as a government in waiting might have parallels now, but when it was first showcased at last year’s Elevator festival ..read more

Pocahogwash: Disney’s amazingly untrue story about a brave young Native American princess who single-handedly threw out the evil forest-destroying British, before welcoming in the the wise all-American settlers, who later stole their land and massacred them. Probably starring Jeremy Irons or Alan Rickman as the evil British captain, Captain Evil. Following straight on from my Roald Dahl piece, where I said I didn’t see what the problem was with the text that had been changed, and earlier pieces such as my reaction to Puppetgate, where I wasn’t offended, you might be asking: “Okay, is there any ..read more

COMMENT: The outrage over the changes to the Roald Dahl books has been blown out of proportion. But it does raise some uncomfortable questions of corporate ownership of work, moral double standards, and the power to censor. Thanks a lot mate. Here I am trying to catch up with the various shit-shows hitting the arts and now what happens? Everybody’s up in arms about Roald Dahl’s books being given the sensitivity reader treatment. And since one of the principal tenets of this blogs is being anti-censorship and pro-artistic freedom, I need to weigh into this, as this is a censorship issue. Like ..read more

Yes, I know, it’s nearly March. The excuse I had is that for the last three weeks I was working solidly on two consecutive plays. I did think about rolling everything over to next month, but on reflection, I’ve decided to stick with a January catchup. Many of the events that started rearing their head in January have gone on to escalate into February. Those I won’t cover here, but I’ll have a lot more to say about them in February. Stuff that happened in January So the one thing I won’t be going over here is the business in Oldham Colosseum. Towards the end of January there were signs things m ..read more

It’s a late list of recommendations this time, which is partly because I’ve had a busy January but also also that the things that catch my eye and a bit end-loaded. Some of the things coming that I rate won’t be happing until May or later, and will go into the next list. This means that what I have left over is a shorter list than usual. Safe choice: My top tier is for plays where I think you can’t go wrong. Not everything is to everyone’s tastes, but if what I describe sounds like your sort of thing, I’m confident you won’t be disappointed. With much of the interesting stuff happening late in ..read more

Skip to: Family album Out goes a cute and wholesome Wonderland popularised by Disney and in comes a sinister Wonderland with danger and menace around every corner. Yes, I like it. I know we should avoid comparing adaptations of stories to the Disney version where one exists, but for one it’s appropriate to open with a bit of Disney trivia. In the early days of Disney, there were two distinct styles of animation. “West coast” was the style that could be considered traditional Disney, with wholesome content, naturalistic drawing and usually a moral. “East coast”, on the other hand, featured mor ..read more

One year ago, the Vault Festival suffered what was surely the worst possible disaster: with days to go before opening night, the whole festival was cancelled. It was very very very bad news for two reasons. Firstly, with Vault 2021 also cancelled, there was a clear three years between Vault festivals, with no guarantee that the community built up over the 2010s would still exist by the end of it. Worse, however, was the timing. 2021 was at least a planned cancellation; 2022, however, was supposed to be the big relaunch. Financially speaking, the last thing you want to do is cancel a large-sca ..read more

COMMENT: Some say it was hate speech, some say it way misunderstood – either way Pleasance mishandled the situation and Jerry Sadowitz has gained from the cancellation. If you’ve made it this far past the Edinburgh Fringe without hearing about the Jerry Sadowitz fiasco, well done. For the rest of you, I’m sorry to have to remind you of this. But just when we thought that all of the arguments over the decisions made by the Festival Fringe Society were dying down, this blew up. So, Jerry Sadowitz is a comedian who I’d never heard of and would probably continued to have never heard of were it no ..read more

So that’s the last of the 2022 plays seen, which leaves just one thing to do*, which is my annual “best of” list. This is always the most interesting bit of my coverage; in a normal review, it is always tempting to say “didn’t they all do well”, but when you’re choosing a winner, you can’t do that. There can only be one winner, and this forces me to decide whose achievements deserve the most recognition. * It is not my last thing to do, I still have one review to write and an Edinburgh Fringe roundup to complete. But let’s forget about that for now. After two years of limited theatre, where I ..read more