theatre
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream At The Rep
The Birmingham Rep has always had an affinity with Shakespeare adaptations with a twist, and their latest staging illustrates this just beautifully. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a wonderfully entertaining spectacle that brings the bard kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. It is beautiful to look at, and a joy to listen to, as the Shakespearean dialect is all in tact. But it is also very, very funny, and ultimately joyous as it proves that ‘the course of true love never did run smooth.’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is Shakespeare at both his most Dreamy, and most mischievous. Directors Joe Murphy and Madeleine Kludje have taken both of those…
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The Rocky Horror Show: A Naughty Delight!
Damn it, Janet! The ultimate in cult musicals returned to the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre last night. Yes I can only be talking about the ‘astounding’ Richard O’ Brien’s Rocky Horror Show, a musical like no other, with an audience who heckle virtually every word and enjoy every single mucky minute. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s a shock to the system, one that leaves you laughing out loud and gasping with shock. In short, It’s a hoot! Based on those late night double features that played at cinema’s during the 1950s, The Rocky Horror Show is a pastiche on B Movies of the Science Fiction and horror variety. Squeaky…
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Small Island – Absolutely Magnificent
Every once in a while you see a piece of theatre that you know will stay with you forever. Last night was one of those occasions. Small Island is the sublime telling of the lives of two very different couples, one white, one black, in London during World War 2 and its aftermath. It examines the racism that black people faced when they accepted the invitation to make a new life in Britain, and also the plight of women trying to hold everything together the best that they can, trying to navigate their way through a new world in wartime and beyond. The story follows the lives of two couples,…
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The Signalman – A Chilling Dickens Masterpiece
The Signalman by Charles Dickens is an eerie ghost story that has been brought to vivid life in a UK tour by the Midde Ground Theatre Company. The tour is concluding this weekend with a run at the Wolverhampton Grand, and last night it showed why Dickens is still a master story teller even after 200 years, especially when it comes to a ghost story. The tale is beautifully, yet simply staged in a signal box in a remote location in 1880. It is manned at night by a lonely Signalman haunted by a spectre who appears just before a tragic event. A chance encounter with a traveller leads to…
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Operation Mincemeat Is An Absolute Joy
There is an old saying that truth is stranger than fiction, and, if anything proves this to be true, it is the incredible story of Operation Mincemeat. Changing the course of a World War by planting fake invasion plans for Sardinia on the body of a fake airman, then dumping both on the beach of neutral Spain in the hope it will get to the eyes of Hitler no less, sounds fantastical and absurd, but this is exactly what happened during World War 2. The story was retold in a 1950’s film, ‘The man who never was’, but even those with the most warped sense of humour wouldn’t think this…
