Julian Eaves 
I’m delighted to say that I’m already booked to go back and have another session with Tick Tick BOOM!, and its fascinating aesthetic conundrums, later in the run. It is the kind of production that rewards such attention.
With Birds Of Paradise there is the sense that they (David Evans and Winnie Holzman) are trying out an ingenious idea, and nearly getting it right.
Pete ‘N’ Keely is great fun and if you just focus on the plentiful goodies, you’ll have a ball.
Margolyes is all stillness and urgent rouge-et-noir power; her delivery like acid etching a design on copperplate. Barber speaks with that magical voice that sounds like oloroso mixed with double cream and sprinkled with Pyrenean truffle. Every second in their company is like reading a gorgeous glossy magazine that you just can’t put down.
“You don’t so much leave at the end of this concert, as sail away from it on a wave of euphoria” says our theatre critic Julian Eaves of Maria Friedman.
Maybe James Shirley isn’t one of the greatest playwrights ever to animate the stages of this country, but he’s far from the worst, and this is probably his best effort. It’s coming back to us at a time of national doubt comparable, in some ways, with the era of its origin.
If you see nothing else this year, see this! It is a hallucinogenic wander through a maze of brilliantly realised spaces, evoking scenes and adventures from the eternally attractive Lewis Carroll Alice stories, and it is one of the most delicious experiences I’ve had in a long time.
Drowning On Dry Land is one of Ayckbourn’s most tonally surprising and unstable works; technically it is also one of his most sparingly and yet also elaborately written, combining apparent thinness of dialogue with intricately complex plotting, where motivation and reactions are typically merely suggested with the most delicate of shading, with hints, or shadows of meaning.
