REVIEW: Windows, Finborough Theatre ✭✭
Overall, however, Windows is a worthy but rather torpid outing for a family who have been ignored professionally for 85 years
Neil McPherson
REVIEW: It Is Easy To Be Dead, Trafalgar Studios 2 ✭✭✭✭✭
Lively, animated, emotional, real, Knox takes the writings of Sorley and brings them wondrously to live with a zeal that is astounding.
FIRST LOOK: It Is Easy To Be Dead, Trafalgar Studios
It Is Easy To Be Dead, a play by Neil McPherson, based on the letters, poetry and brief life of Charles Hamilton Sorley transfers to Trafalgar Studios 2 after a critically acclaimed sell-out run at the Finborough Theatre opening on Armistice Day – Friday 11 November 2016. When twenty-year-old Charles Sorley is killed in action during the First World War, his devastated parents are left with only his letters and poems to remember him by. Using his extraordinary writings, together with music and songs of the period, It Is Easy To Be Dead is a tender portrait of a brief life filled with promise, cut short by the futility of war. It Is Easy To Be Dead features live music and songs from some of the greatest composers of the period including George Butterworth, Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna, Ivor Gurney, John Ireland, Rudi Stephan and Ralph Vaughan Williams. It Is Easy … Read more
It Is Easy To be Dead Comes To Finborough Theatre
Neil McPherson’s play It Is Easy To Be Dead commemorating the centenary of the Battle Of The Somme, will have its World premiere at the Finborough Theatre from 15 June – 9 July 2016. It Is Easy To Be Dead is based on the poetry, letters and brief life of Charles Hamilton Sorley. Born in Aberdeen, Charles Sorley was studying in Germany when the First World War broke out and was briefly imprisoned as an enemy alien. He was one of the first to join the army in 1914. Killed in action a year later at the age of 20, his poems are among the most ambivalent , profound and moving war poetry ever written. It Is Easy To Be Dead tells the story of Sorley’s brief life through his work, with music and songs from some of the greatest composers of the period including George Butterworth, Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna, … Read more
Horniman’s Choice at The Finborough Theatre
The Finborough Theatre has announced that it will present Horniman’s Choice in September 2015 bringing together four one act plays from the ‘Manchester School’ of playwrights. “If Lancashire playwrights will send their plays to me I shall pledge myself to read them through. Let them not write as one dramatist does, about Countesses and Duchesses and society existing in imaginations, but about their friends and enemies – about real life.” – Annie Horniman These plays by Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse, were all originally championed by Annie Horniman, owner of the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, the first repertory theatre in Britain. The four plays chosen are:- THE PRICE OF COAL by Harold Brighouse 1909. The mines. Collier Jack Tyldesley heads off at 5.30am for another day’s hard graft at the coalface. His lover, Mary Bradshaw, has promised to answer his marriage proposal when he returns home, but Jack’s mother … Read more
