★★★★★ Against a lovingly-detailed set that evoked the Paris Metro, with its deco panelling and art nouveau lettering, and warmed by Elliot Griggs’ deliciously sympathetic lighting, we were instantly thrown into the noisy French capital.  Audrey Brisson immediately stood out as the naïve, enigmatic Amélie.

★★★☆☆ This play, original written and performed in 2013, tells the story of four iconic, black, American men who meet in a hotel room one night in 1964. There to celebrate the victory of the young Mohammed Ali, then Cassius Clay, were nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, singer and record producer Sam Cooke, sportsman Jim Brown and the celebrated boxer himself; newly crowned heavyweight champion of the world.

Each separate production is an impressive stand-alone achievement; taken together, they surely represent a new high-water mark for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. . . a bravely ambitious enterprise, and an extraordinarily successful one. 

★★★★★ Puccini wouldn’t have envisaged his Marcello with a laptop, or that a cast for his opera could be as comfortable performing in the foyer of a theatre as on its main stage. But Opera Up Close are the masters of reinvention, and on this evening’s showing will have made many new friends here in Bristol.

★★★★☆  Six figures pull and push, writhe and wrestle, arching over each other’s backs until, one by one, five of them fall to the floor as if dead.  The sixth does not fall, and he is the only white performer. In an intensely gripping hour of physical theatre, Freeman tells six stories, threaded together by recurring themes of institutional racism and injustice.