Bristol OLD VIC

★★★★☆ 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...

★★★★☆ Christmas time is a very special time of year and lots of people have their first ever trip to the theatre to see a Christmas show. And if you love this brilliant show perhaps mummy and daddy will take ...

★★★★☆ It would be difficult to reinterpret a story with such a strong and clear message. Notwithstanding, Tom Morris has deconstructed the tale with half an eye on contemporary Britain, putting it back togethe...

★★★★☆ The production is conceived as a communal trip, an Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, with a bunch of late-sixties hedonists deciding to ‘do’ the play somebody had left lying around. It is a clever device,...

★★★★★ Touching the Void dramatizes the autobiographical account of Joe Simpson’s near fatal experience during the climb of the Siula Grande mountain. As with most real life stories where ultimate death is av...

★★★★☆ Bernard Pomerance’s play premiered over forty years ago and since then it has garnered many awards, though some critics have been distinctly unhappy about one of its key features. Unlike the well-know...

★★★★☆ The themes are perfect for our time, dealing with the purity of democracy in a world of ambiguity as politicians and victims of a Civil War come to terms with what peace and reconciliation mean when comb...

I’d be less than surprised if displayed somewhere in Sally Cookson’s study was the rubric, ‘Anything film can do I can do better with just imagination and people’. Ms. Cookson, with her accustomed imagination an...

TENDER NAPALM ★★★★☆ This is the final play in this year’s season. The four productions have been impressive showcases for the very talented graduating directors from the BOVTS, and no less impressive has be...

★★★★☆ Tennessee Williams’ play concerns those subterranean currents of sex and class, which however Americans might protest to the contrary, runs through American society as much as British. Where D.H.Lawren...