Bristol OLD VIC

★★★☆☆ 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...

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 extraord...

★★★★★ 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 ma...

★★★★☆  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 perfo...

HOW MY LIGHT IS SPENT on 21st May ★★★☆☆ This is a poetic, optimistic and magical story, set in circumstances that are all too grimly real. It tells the story of a man in his thirties, Jimmy, who has lost h...

★★★★☆ Through a series of realistically authentic vignettes we see how the effect that sexual pressures have on the young and vulnerable.  Updated contemporary references help underline how confusing the subj...

★★★★☆ Baal is the picaresque story concerning the history of a dissolute anti-hero, an outsider who through a particular genius gains a mythical cult status - something which no doubt attracted David Bowie to ...

★★★★★ Not everything is easy to understand, but there is power in ambiguity as the audience is allowed to make up their own mind and not be spoon fed explanations.  Gecko manage to pull off a stunning show, w...

★★★★☆ It would be easy to read the play as merely a critique of the South African apartheid regime, but that comfortable option would be to overlook the ever-present dangers that seep out with depressing regul...

★★★★☆ Tom Mothersdale’s creation is a dark, impulsively malevolent thing.  A bustling, misshapen upstart, swooping around the stage like a balletic crab, his pincers jabbing and snipping at anything that ge...

★★★☆☆ 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 t...

★★★★☆ The action starts in a Theban ping-pong parlour, where the young Hercules is proving to be unbeatable. He is urged on by a shouty Zeus, the epitome of ‘competitive dad’, who believes that there is n...