Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating: * * * * *
Cast: Clare Beresford, Dominic Conway, Miriam Gould, Charlie Penn, Tom Penn, Eugenie Pastor, Alexander Scott, Shamira Turner.
Little Bulb Theatre has certainly come a long way since forming in 2008 as students at the University of Kent. Now an award winning company they continue to produce exciting and innovative theatre.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The rigours of the day, the small, petty and the otherwise inconsequential can mount up to the point where the meaning of life is clouded, it becomes fogged up with bruising and baffling irritation that it can offend the very sensibility of music and it can something very unexpected to soothe the day over; something that might have been missed.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9.5/10
The Liverpool Philharmonic Hall resonates to the sound of ghosts, the aural phantoms of pleasure who have been retained and thankfully allowed to stay filtering and flitting through the expanse of work that has been undertaken in the prestigious venue, all of them forever it seems to harness the energy of every new act that comes along and plays to the gallery and the crowd.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw, Helena Bonham-Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Grace Stotter, Adrian Schiller, Natalie Press, Geoff Bell, Amanda Lawrence, Romola Garai, Finbar Lynch, Samuel West, Clive Wood, Annabelle Dowler, Simon Gifford.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale, Ben Schwartz, Steve Valentine, Benedict Samuel, Stuart Fink, Yanik Ethier, Soleyman Pierini, Patrick Baby, Marie Turgeon, Clément Sibony, César Domboy, Mark Camacho.
There are some individuals in this world who when you come across them make you glad to be alive. Not for the passion of love, but for the sheer scale of their ambition to create something so unique that it can never be topped, something so artistic, so elegant, so completely and utterly insane that it screams with joy when you see it visualised.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating: * * *
Cast: Mary Pearson
It is difficult to sum up what The Sand Dog Cometh is about, as American writer, actor and director of the show Mary Pearson has created something that is no doubt unique in its entirety. Running for just over an hour, Pearson crams it full with films of derelict Liverpool, sculptures of sand dogs and mad dance sequences. The madness creeps into the audience too, as at one point, popcorn is handed out and the crowd is encouraged to share and to get to know the neighbours, the people that sit with anonymity during the darkness of any theatre production, those we might not normally think of during any trip to the theatre. Pearson too, takes her seat amongst the audience and proceeds to shave her legs whilst serenading audience members.
Let It Be at The Royal Court, Liverpool. October 2015. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Liverpool’s rich, almost exuberant, heritage for popular music has a long and proud history but it one that is missing a vital component to the story, one that history, fate and circumstance has seen fit to take away from the city that arguably gave popular culture to the U.K. after the Post-War austerity. The Beatles, the foursome who kick started a revolution, never returned to the city in their absolute pomp and ceremony in which to give the fans who propelled them to the top of the charts a sense of completion, of revelling in the majesty that the progressive nature of the band would have gone down a storm in at any of the venues in the city at the time.
Liverpool Sound & Vision Rating: * * * * *
Cast: Jess Green
Performance poet Jess Green focuses her poetry on her own experiences of when she worked in schools as a reading champion. She has created a very fast paced performance, lasting just over an hour and delivers no less than ten unique poems accompanied by acoustic guitar and a Cajon drum. Green introduces us to Janine, a tired sixty-something who is fighting for her pension on the picket line, and Sandra the librarian who secretly removes ‘unsuitable’ books and takes them to the tip. There are many more characters in Green’s repertoire and all just as quirky and funny as the last.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Victor Garber, Daniel Kaluuya, Julio Cedillo, Jon Bernthal, Bernardo P. Saracino, Kim Larrichio, Eb Lottimer.
Who is the pawn in the biggest game when it comes to trafficking on the borders of the United States of America and Mexico? Arguably the richest country on Earth per capita and one of the poorest sitting side by side, the inequality between the two countries perhaps never really equalled out going back to the war between the two countries in which had land not been lost and ceded to the United States, all that money that flowed from the discovery of oil would have seen the economies of the two countries wildly different as the 21st Century progressed.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Eric Kofi Abrefa, Erin Doherty, Tom Mothersdale, Greta Scacchi.
If you can place human experience into the realms of the zoo, the caged animal yearning for freedom, an escape from the rigid and the pawed upon control that comes with the overpowering smell that lingers with the cruelly defeated and gazed upon, then that tightness, that crushed inevitability of life’s cruel illusion is only tempered by the huge cosmic joke played upon us all and perhaps arguably no play best typifies this than Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie.