Christine Firkin 
You For Me For You is a well crafted and significant piece that gives its audiences an opportunity to connect briefly with a situation that needs to be experienced to be fully understood.
Around the World in 80 Days is one of the classic tales by Jules Verne, who in the 19th century wrote epic stories of adventure and futuristic scenarios that still captivate the readers of today. This production at the St James Theatre until 17th January is a retelling by Laura Eason who pays due homage to the brilliance of the original whilst highlighting the contemporary relevance of the old story.
This is a Xmas Special that doesn’t hammer home the same old Christmas songs ad nauseam. Instead it gives Blues Brothers enthusiasts plenty of the music they know and love and rounds out the show with a treatment of a smattering of Christmas songs in their own inimitable style.
Echoes is a success for many reasons but fundamentally it’s because there is such strength in the story telling. In fact there are 2 stories running concurrently and though the time periods in the stories are 175 years apart and told by 2 actors independently, there is such deep and meaningful symbiosis between them so that what can be a fragmented experience is a beautiful whole.
By the end of the play there is a horrifying awareness that a variation of this story is currently being enacted for real somewhere in the near vicinity: in immediate families, next door, down the road, but certainly not further away than the next suburb. This is a situation, indeed a problem that concerns everyone and there is no doubt that it should be put in front of the eyes and ears of the young people who need to hear.
