★★★★☆ Romantics Anonymous is highly entertaining, though the plot has pretty much run is course by the interval, and the second half consists of a repetition of the same will-they-or-won’t-they theme. It’s rather old-fashioned in many ways, and its combination of wit, romance and dance is very reminiscent of the Astaire and Rogers musicals of the 1930’s.
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★★★☆☆ Laura arrives at her father’s croft with her older lover Suzanne, determined to have a romantic break. Isolated from the modern world, the couple’s squabbling soon gives way to dredging up the hidden history of the croft which seems to linger in its foundations.
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★★★★☆ Yasmina Reza is good at ruthlessly puncturing the pretensions of her characters, but her Darwinist vision offers little in the way of hope. God Of Carnage is very funny, but the humour is underpinned with more than a little pessimism about the human race. It’s Lord Of The Flies, but with jokes. Highly recommended.
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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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★★★★☆ The BOV Young Company is made up of young people aged 5-25 from across Bristol and together with the creative team deserves enormous praise for producing the first highlight of 2020. They demonstrate the power of theatre and the abiding truth that even ancient stories can reveal about the human condition.
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