★★★★☆ Fred is intrepid. He wants to be like everyone else, just a regular sort of guy. In this he is exhorted by the show’s director, Ben Pettitt-Wade, to “be his own puppet”. But being made of fabric and stuffing, and well, just being a puppet, makes attempting a ‘normal’ life pretty tricky.
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★★★☆☆ This harmless interval of silly nonsense will no doubt bring some much-needed light relief from the background anxieties of national and international politics as it crisscrosses the land – a tittering while Rome falls perhaps . . . throughout, Nigel Hook’s collapsing stage always vied for as much attention as the players.
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★★★★☆ New Old Friends has teamed up with the Lichfield Garrick theatre to present a very adult take on the 12 Days of Christmas. A cast of just four peopled the Ustinov stage with 13 characters, circling each other with festive paranoia as the bumping off began, Agatha Christie style, one by one . . . Great fun.
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Drawing on Caravaggio’s painting, The Seven Acts of Mercy, as inspiration, Lustgarten’s play attempts a commonality between the seventeenth century painter’s relationship with power (nobles and the Church) and his depiction of the common man’s empathy to his fellow man, as outlined in Matthew 25:36-37, and contemporary down-at-heel lives in Bootle, Liverpool
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The Old Vic rounds off its 250th year with a magical retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, which director Lee Lyford describes as an epic emotional journey as well as a physical one. Gerda’s quest to save her childhood friend Kai has contemporary resonances with other leading female roles such as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games, or Hermione Granger in Harry Potter . . . But a breathless second half, in which the baddies (always the best) really get going, makes for a barnstorming holiday show.
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