Theatre, Reviews and Paul Dale

Bette and Joan - The Final Curtain

Witty other-worldly ode to Hollywood starlets

23 Aug 2011

It’s 1989 and Bette Davis, betrayed by kith and kin, lies alone and dying. Her nemesis Joan Crawford arrives to guide her to the other side, and then the fireworks begin. Foursight Theatre’s witty and inventive deconstruction of the relationship between…

New World Order

Neo-conspiracy crimes, Shakespearean-style

21 Aug 2008

Fringe acclaimed over the last two years for Love Labours Won, West Yorkshire writer, director and performer Ryan JW Smith returns with a much more bitter pill. Smith loves Shakespeare. His is the cut'n'paste approach to the bard; his conceit here is…

Another Kind of Silence

Enviromentalist writer brought to compelling life

21 Aug 2008

If the environmental movement in the US has a progenitor and figurehead it is marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson. Her writing and research in the late 1950s/early 1960s brought attention to the then unfashionable issue of conservation…

Foreskins Lament

21 Aug 2008

This dodgy production of New Zealand playwright Greg McGee's landmark 1980 play is played out in the locker room of a local rugby club changing room. A couple of really appalling performances and some less than inspired direction derail things. Still at…

St Nicholas

All theatre critics are bloodsucking scum

14 Aug 2008

Conor McPherson was clearly settling old scores when he wrote St Nicholas in 1997. Like many of his earliest plays, it’s a monologue and tall tale. This one is told by a successful Dublin theatre critic, a self professed ‘hack and a drunkard’. Bitter…

More Lives than One – Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas

14 Aug 2008

Taking inspiration from Micheál MacLiammóir’s legendary one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar, veteran thesp Leslie Clark takes a less sycophantic view of Wildean times. This is illuminating stuff. Clark commandeers the audience, but (among other…

Weights

A see and eye shotgun tale

7 Aug 2008

Poet, playwright, actor and former judo champion Lynn Manning knows all about loss. Raised in penury in California, Manning lost his parents to the bottle and his siblings to the foster care system. Then in 1978, aged 23, Manning lost his sight in a…

Lucidity

7 Aug 2008

Imagine One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest adapted by the kids from Skins, but worse. Hysteria is the order of the day when suicidal posh nob nihilist Julian gets sectioned. Stock characters are wheeled out, while Oliver James' Affluenza is filtered…

Time Bomb

7 Aug 2008

It's 2017 and Westminster wants to go nuclear on Iran, but MP Victoria Clarke and her middle English family hold a secret that could change the vote forever. There's some nice ideas about where the personal and apocalyptic meet in Tim Burton's one-act…

The Open Couple

7 Aug 2008

This re-improvised restaging of Dario Fo and Franca Rame's superb, oft overlooked 1983 two-hander is a delight. Though too young for their roles (Fo and Rame played them in their 50s), Stuart Brennan and Jennifer Dean are brilliantly convincing as the…

How to Steal a Diamond

Byre Theatre, St Andrews, Thu 5 Oct, then touring

2 Oct 2006

CRIME/COMEDY/DRAMA Oxygen and water, that’s what diamonds are made of. And yet whatever rung of society you are hanging off, the possession of these rocks is an invitation to a world of riches. Inspiring independent theatre company, Vox Motus…