Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Frances Ashman, Stephanie Cole, William Hope, Natalie Klamar, Hywel Morgan, Brian Protheroe, Jane Wymark, Tristram Wymark.
The patient has been seen by many consultants over the years, some with the very best of intentions, some whose intentions are perhaps dubious at best and down- right scandalous at worst and yet somehow the patient is still here and still keeping society going. The N.H.S. still carries on delivering from cradle to the grave.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Barrie Rutter, Emily Butterfield, Darren Kuppan, Jack Quarton, Ben Burman, Elizabeth Eves, Sophie Hatfield, Lauryn Redding, Brett Lee Roberts, Mark Thomas, Russell Richardson.
An August Bank Holiday Lark, the chance for some men to become heroes, for some to find some meaning or importance in life away from the remote villages they may have been raised in all their lives or even the chance to be looked at differently by those they need validation or even respect from. An August Bank Holiday Lark, the hazy days of summer before Gavro Princip took a gun and assassinated one man and his wife and started the ball rolling on the first mechanised whole sale slaughter of soldiers and civilians that tore through Europe and beyond.
Renowned theatre company Out of Joint puts the N.H.S. front and centre in their latest play as they bring Stella Feehily’s This May Hurt a Bit to Liverpool. Featuring national treasure Stephanie Cole, the critically acclaimed hit will be putting the patient and the institution under the microscope from Wednesday 7th to Saturday 10th May.
A month after stating, “We will stop the top-down reorganisation of the N.H.S. that has got in the way of patient care”, the government launched the biggest top-down reorganisation the service had seen in its 65-year history. With wit, tenderness, and splashes of the surreal, Stella Feehily’s new play follows one family’s journey through the digestive system of the NHS, and asks: what’s the prognosis?
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Bruce Alexander, Andy Apollo, Jason Carragher, Callum Coates, Daniel Coonan, Julia Ford, Scott Hazell, Lloyd Hutchinson, Denise Kennedy, Tom Peters, Joe Ringwood, Shannon Tarbet, Liam Tobin, Daryl Wafer.
Arthur Miller’s plays are such that to miss out on a production of them is simply not good form. All you really need to know about life in the United States in the 20th Century can be found in the writings of one of the keenest minds of the time and his look at certain frailties of life, emasculation, deceit, dishonour and the destruction of a system that was corrupt and hopelessly out of touch with his thinking, are repeated over and again in the hope that someone, anyone might understand what is going wrong in the country.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Andy Daniel.
How would you spend the final few hours of your life if you had been labelled a coward after a hearing that would have lasted less than an hour, placed in a cell by yourself and far from home? Would you kick and scream, raging against a world that was off kilter to your actions and perception or would you spend it in isolation with your thoughts, all moments of transitory life flashing before you and the memories of happy times keeping you company till the dawn awoke in time to see you die?
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Christopher Timothy, Kelly Hotten, Philip Cairns, Daniel Betts, Robert Perkins.
They say a murder cannot be perfect for somebody will always at least know about it, even if they are the ones who end up dead. However a homicide can be near perfect when presented on stage in the form of Frederick Knott’s outstanding play Dial M For Murder.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Clever comedy used to be sneered at, it would be seen by some as the preserve of a university system that was, possibly rightly, too elite for many to understand. Perhaps with the great timing that the Cosmos affords us, the only creatures on the planet that deal in time as a concept rather than just the way of marking the difference between night and day or when to mate and eat and die, the 20th Anniversary of the legendary American Bill Hicks’ passing has been more kind to this type of humour.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Aretha Ayeh, Marianne Benedict, Carla Freeman, Matthew Ganley, Lindsay Goodhead, Sam Haywood, Adam Keast, Sarah Moss, Griffin Stevens, Francis Tucker.
For Sarah A. Nixon and Mark Chatterton, the writers of the Playhouse Theatre Rock ‘N’ Roll Panto, the subject of Aladdin is one that they have revisited with pride a couple of times but never like this, not with the scale, the almost sense of the wonderful and wonderment all wrapped up in a festive feast that was exactly the production and performance that audiences could have wished for.
Cast: Michael Hugo, Samantha Robinson, Angela Bain, Howard Chadwick, Claire Storey, Paul Barnhill, Alan McMahon, Robert Pickavance, Dyfig Morris, Sophie Hatfield, Hester Arden.
Whilst the overall central theme of The Grand Gesture may be worrying to some and have others wondering how you can have a comedy set around the premise of a man wanting to end his life, it shouldn’t though detract from the very superb way that Northern Broadsides, perhaps one of the keenly anticipated companies that makes its way on regular basis to the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre, took on Nikolai Erdman’s brilliant work The Suicide.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Mark Arends, Tim Dutton, Stephen Fewell, Christopher Patrick Nolan, Matthew Spencer, Gavin Spokes, Mandi Symonds, Hara Yannas, Richard Bremmer, Joshua Higgott.
To do justice to arguably one of the finest pieces of English Literature of the 20th Century on stage takes a team so immersed into what they are trying to achieve, that all else is secondary. To bring to life the horror that awaits Winston Smith from the spectre of Big Brother that is stamped like an impregnable tattoo all over the face of decency in 1984 takes a fantastic director, an adaptor of work who can make the simmering tension boil over again and again and two men you can believe in from start to finish to capture the spirit of a nation, of a world that has become the stuff of nightmares.