I really enjoyed this production of Brecht’s play at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Quarry Theatre was an ideal venue for this big production with a choir on stage. There was that sense of a theatrical event that the National Theatre were trying to achieve with their production of Mother Courage, but none of…
Read more The Caucasian Chalk Circle (West Yorkshire Playhouse 9th October 2009)
This was a beautiful production playing with boundaries between cinema and theatre. The plot was very straight forward but carefully worked out, which managed to build up tension throughout the two parts. I felt that we didn’t particularly like any of the characters but we wanted justice to be done in the end. What I…
Read more Dial M for Murder (West Yorkshire Playhouse, 30th September 2009)
I think I was surprised. I had read other reviews and I didn’t think that I would enjoy this production, but I had a really good time. it just shows though how diverse the reviews can be. The Telegraph gives the production 5 stars, but Charles Hutchinson in the Yorkshire Evening Press found flaws and…
Antony Neilson’s The Wonderful World Of Dissocia deals with bipolar disorder and sets the action in two sphere’s Lisa’s journey and then her hospitalization. The contrast between the two parts of the play comment on each other and create a series of layers which makes this play very powerful as well as entertaining. Neilson’s Edward…
Read more Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness (WYP, 12th March 2009, WYP)
The epistolary novel was very popular in the eighteenth century, and there have been examples of this form of story telling since, but in a world of email, letter writing has been transformed to the digital format and used less frequently than it was. Can any Mother Help? takes us back to paper, pen and…
For one week in February, when you walked up to the West Yorkshire Playhouse you would have been confronted by two large poster images of David Oluwale and Othello (Lenny Henry). I’m not sure whether it was a deliberate decision for the West Yorkshire Playhouse to put on The Hounding of David Oluwale and Othello…
Julie Raby 