★★★☆☆ Written with a certain amount of sentimentality around a lost love the play offers us false trails; is it about rekindled passion, perhaps in an open relationship, or then is it about past indiscretion, a coming home to roost of an abuse of authority or position? It eventually turns out to be a wistful contemplation on a secret love affair.
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★★☆☆☆ The Verdict is an archetypal example of a legal procedural with a smattering of dysfunctional-but-endearing male protagonist tropes thrown in. Frank’s a bit of a drunk, he’s separated from his wife, he’s got a sad past but ultimately he knows he has to do the right thing
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★★★☆☆ This powerful play is set against the background of the Black Civil Rights campaigns in Bristol in the sixties. With recent publicity about the Windrush generation the play is particularly relevant at the moment.
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★★★★☆ Plunged into a long sleepless night of self-reflection, Lewis is ‘visited’ by three generations of male forebears each bearing harrowing chapters from a story that climbs from the privations of slavery and a harrowing lynching to drunkenness and early death from drug overdose.
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★★★★☆ Within the continuum of Godot productions, director Paul Milton’s take is certainly a traditional one. The air of this staging is not so much deference though, more an attitude of if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it. The set and set-up go fairly unaltered from their textual outline: the tramps, the tree, the traveller and his slave.
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★★★★☆ Human nature doesn’t change much over time, and this is strongly demonstrated in Patrick Marber’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The original play premiered in 1888, and Marber’s adaptation is set in the 1940s, played out in front of a 2019 audience, and yet the dynamics are instantly recognisable.
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