Sunday, March 13, 2016
Musical theatre is growing rapidly on the fringe, thanks to venues that focus on small-scale shows and producers staging lesser-known works. New British musicals are seen less often, with on…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:48AMFriday, March 11, 2016
It’s 2011. Ben and Jibreel are typical teenaged boys – obsessed with video games, worried about girls, school, friends and family. They regularly meet on X-box Live for lengthy gaming se…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:58PMThursday, March 10, 2016
I had never heard of Mary Seacole until I began working in UK schools, several years after my arrival to the UK. What a woman!
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:04AMWednesday, March 9, 2016
Cross-gender and gender blind casting goes a long way to fight the pervasive gender inequality in theatre. With male characters dominating Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, these casting app…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:38PMSunday, March 6, 2016
Say your only close friends are people you work with. Can you trust them to help you out if you’re struggling with your health? Martin’s mental health is deteriorating, so Daniel, Louis …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:33AMWednesday, March 2, 2016
1973, a village in rural England. Fifteen-year-old Dinah is placed in the care of 49-year-old, first time foster mother, Lotte (not ‘Lottie,’ that’s an English name!). As the two navig…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:51PMTuesday, March 1, 2016
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a love story, a swan song and a spectacle of supernatural life. It lends itself well to adaptation what with its complex, intertwining themes. In Mirando: The …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:24PMSunday, February 28, 2016
Women get the raw end of the deal no matter how young or old they are, how mainstream or alternative. Two late twenty-somethings, acquaintances through a mutual late friend but with complete…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:55AMFriday, February 26, 2016
If theatre is a mirror held up to the world, then evidence is increasing that change is imminent. But what form will it take? Will the people rally as in The Caucasian Chalk Circle or will w…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:36PMWednesday, February 24, 2016
Two West Country lads speed through the night as both cheerful teenagers and disillusioned twenty-somethings. They wear cheap fancy dress masks; one is Batman and the other small and indisti…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:27PMTuesday, February 23, 2016
Tia is fourteen and lives with her foster mum in Rochdale. She’s had a rough life growing up the care system, and no one seems to care about her. When she meets “youth worker” AJ in a …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:35PMMaybe the witch in Snow White isn’t that bad. Or, maybe her badness is justified, like she had a traumatic childhood or suffers from a mental illness. Siobhan McMillan proposes just that: …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:01AMSaturday, February 20, 2016
Amy Fleming’s dad committed suicide when she was four years old. Fleming struggles with mood swings and wonders if she’s “mental,” like her dad. Luckily, she studied Molecular Medici…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:09PMThursday, February 18, 2016
Two middle-aged men sit in a run down office. They’re police officers, Denny and Joey. This is Chicago in the 1990s, and Denny, a family man, does what he needs to do to support his wife a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:11PMThe witches in Macbeth are the most interesting and powerful characters in Shakespeare’s play, and the easiest to reconceptualise. I’ve seen them as nurses, children, old men, dancers an…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:02PMSunday, February 14, 2016
Half of the UK population born after 1960 will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime. Considering this figure, cancer rarely features as the primary subject matter in theatre, thoug…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:05PMSaturday, February 13, 2016
What happens when a director completely disregards age, gender and nationality in a Shakespeare production, then stages it in a former cricket bat factory with a stripped-back aesthetic and …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:26PMFriday, February 12, 2016
With two shows a day, six days a week for a month and a half, I could keenly feel the anguish of opera troupe The Overtones’ pub booking in AJ Evans’ Dress Rehearsal, even though those d…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:07PMWednesday, February 10, 2016
Going to a Crick Crack Club storytelling event is a bit like joining a private members’ club. This club doesn’t have strict entry criteria, nor is it cold and exclusive – quite the opp…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:19PMSunday, February 7, 2016
The Rose, the tiny fringe theatre built on the remains of its Elizabethan original, is one of the most unique theatres in London. It has its issues, though. Rather than the hierarchy with an…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:19AMFriday, February 5, 2016
As picturesque as agrarian life may be with it’s rustic farmhouses, sweeping land and livestock, it is not an easy one for older and younger generations who just want to make a decent livi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMWednesday, February 3, 2016
Halvard Solness is afraid. He’s afraid of young people displacing him, and heights. But he is revered as the master builder of his town, a self-made man with luck on his side. The midd…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:42PMThe wonderful thing about new writing is the potential for discovering unknown gems, perfectly formed and ready for a transfer or a tour, or a piece that is still finding its shape but its p…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:23PMSunday, January 31, 2016
Without question, my best new writing discovery of 2015 was young writer Isley Lynn’s play Tether at Edinburgh Fringe. This surprising, diverse two-hander also made it into the top five of…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:33AMFriday, January 29, 2016
Grief doesn’t need words to communicate. Music and movement are much better mediums for the relentless, gut ripping echo that is losing someone you love. The Wrong Crowd’s latest work Ki…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:35AMTuesday, January 26, 2016
David and Charlotte’s ten-year relationship is on the rocks. He’s struggling with an addiction that’s pushing her out of his busy life, but David’s social media and internet habits a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:35PMSunday, January 24, 2016
Sometimes, simplicity in narrative structure is more effective than twists, heaps of characters and subplots. Storytelling has been a powerful medium for time immemorial. in/out (a feeling) …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:29PMFour hundred years ago this April, Shakespeare died. A bunch of academics decided to take advantage of this bizarre anniversary and launched Shakespeare 400. It’s a great excuse for a nati…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:01PMSaturday, January 23, 2016
Though drastic re-imaginings of Shakespeare’s plays can show the contemporary relevance of his workgroups the use of a clear, justifiable concept, randomly slapping on cool ideas has the o…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:04PMFriday, January 22, 2016
Lots of things seem like a great idea at uni. Some of them are genuinely good ideas. A great deal more aren’t. Writing a play about Hitler in the Big Brother House is one of the latter. In…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:22PMThursday, January 21, 2016
The Civil Rights movement in America was a time of turbulence and violence, but both black and white activists retaliated with their passion for equality. The issue divided individual famili…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:55PM 
