REVIEW: Sinbad The Sailor, Theatre Royal Stratford East ✭✭✭

Book tickets to Sinbad The Sailor at Theatre Royal Straford East

Some people attending probably only ever go to the theatre to see the Christmas panto, and this certainly doesn’t disappoint. Some attending may even by inspired to go and read up on the beautiful stories whence the title figure springs. And some will merely be grateful that this provides two and a half hours in which they do not have to try to entertain their children: the show will do that for them.

REVIEW: Brass, Hackney Empire ✭✭✭✭✭

National Youth Theatre's production of Benjamin Till's Brass

The show’s score is one that you want – you need – to revisit again and again. Till and his collaborators are such major talents that there isn’t a single line, phrase or bar that doesn’t repay repeated hearing. Quite honestly, it’s a breath-taking achievement.

Tennessee Williams’ Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur Casting

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur by Tennessee Wiliams at The Print Room At The Coronet

The rarely performed Tennessee Williams’ play A Lovely Sunday for Creve Couer is to open the Autumn Season at The Print Room at The Coronet. One of the greatest American playwrights of the last century and best known for plays including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, this play is one of Williams’ rarer plays. It’s Sunday morning in early June, 1930s St Louis. In a sweltering apartment, as Dorothea completes her rigorous daily exercise regime, Bodey is in the kitchen, frying chicken for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. Upstairs neighbour Mrs Gluck has depression so bad she can’t even make coffee, and now Dorothea’s spinster colleague Helena arrives with the news that she’s found a lovely new apartment for them to share. But Dorothea’s mind is elsewhere, she is hoping for a call from the man of her dreams… Casting … Read more

REVIEW: The Cocktail Party, Print Room At The Coronet ✭✭✭✭

The Cocktail Party - Print Room at the Coronet

There are many more layers both to this play and to this production that deserve further comment, but which lie beyond the reach of a relatively brief review. Suffice to say that this production makes a very well thought-through case for revisiting Eliot’s plays as a whole, and serves to remind us that there is a lot more important drama to his name than the one work we all know – namely Cats – which of course he never intended for the stage.