★★★★☆ Bidding farewell to youth, becoming the next older generation, being solely responsible for one’s life, can all be fearful freefall-type moments. Diverse City pull no punches here, but in this brutally honest exposé of mid-life menopausal crisis, there is something endearingly human about Claire, Jacqui and Karen’s stories. And by the end we are literally dancing with them to the tune of I Am What I Am by Gloria Gaynor.
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★★★☆☆ The Theatre Royal seems a very suitable venue for Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories. Home to several ghosts of its own, including the famous ‘Grey Lady’, a phantom doorman and a ‘Thing’ composed of several screaming faces accompanied by cold chills and whispering voices, a gentler apparition here is said to take the form of a butterfly.
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★★★★★ There’s a seething rave-meets-festival atmosphere to a night in which a perambulatory audience is encouraged to sing with gusto by colourful karaoke displays and a throbbing rock band, the Sweaty Bureaucrats and their charismatic singer and dancer Nandi Bhebhe. For in-your-face entertainment, general hilarity, audience participation with knobs on, coupled with nailed-on examples of Trumpian despotism, look no further.
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★★★★☆ All the classic panto moments are here – sweets thrown into the audience, the audience singalong, the parish notices and four children getting goody bags onstage, before the inevitable marriage finale, for which the costume designers had thrown away all caution. All as good as a flaming Christmas pud.
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★★☆☆☆ Ten Times Table is one of Ayckbourn’s trilogy of plays written during winter months in the 1970’s, the others being Just Between Ourselves and Time and Time Again. Seen together they have come to represent the period when Ayckbourn turned his focus onto social realism, finding a darker edge than in previous works.
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