Liverpool Fringe Festival returns over the next fortnight – offering theatregoers the chance to see a host of new plays at venues in the city. The productions will be staged at 81 Renshaw Street, Frederik’s, the Casa, the Bombed Out Church, The Caledonia, the Jacaranda, Valley Theatre, and the Hope Street Theatre. Among them is dark comedy King of the World by Brian Coyle, being staged at 81 Renshaw Street on June 6 and 7 and which asks, what happens when a man with an enormo

Deaf School, David O’Doherty, Alan Bennett and A Christmas Carol are among the line-up in the Everyman & Playhouse’s new season. The autumn and winter season also includes a return for Everyman alumnus Matthew Kelly – appearing in Bennett’s The Habit of Art, a new play by Northern Broadsides, and a dramatization of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. And the line-up features the previously-announced new stage adaptation of bestseller The Lovely Bones, coming to the Everyman for two wee

Buccaneers and buried gold come to a park or garden near you this summer as MATE Productions presents its latest open-air theatre show. The Prescot-based company has created a steampunk re-imagining of Phil Wilmott’s adaption of Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stephenson’s classic tale of piratical derring-do. Expect swashbuckling a-plenty as young Jim Hawkins and the mysterious Long John Silver set off on an adventure to find Captain Flint’s buried treasure on a map where X m

The annual Summer Arts Market returns to Liverpool Cathedral this weekend. The event, organised by Open Culture, will see dozens of artisan craftsmen and women selling their bespoke wares. Jewellery, artwork, clothing, food, drink, wood carving, homewares, ceramics, stationary, beauty products, glassware and Liverpool-centric gifts will all be on sale. The June market is a sister event to the popular Winter Arts Market, and thousands of people are expected to descend on the c

Liverpoool’s internationally-acclaimed Wired Aerial Theatre will bring its extraordinary style of bungee-assisted dance to the Three Festivals Tall Ships Regatta this weekend. The company has been commissioned to perform a new work, entitled To Me, To You…., on the waterfront over the festival. Wired specialises in creating inventive aerial productions with the use of flyable set pieces as well as performer/animation interaction. It will perform three shows a day for three da

Football World Cup fever is about to strike again – but who remembers the FIFA tournament of 1978? Writer Gerry Linford for one, who used it for the setting of a story which was not only chosen as the runner up in the Liverpool Hope Playwriting Prize but is getting its premiere during the current World Cup, and with one of its judges in the leading role. Les Dennis was so impressed by A Prayer to St Cajetan – now renamed The Miracle of Great Homer Street – that he decided to

Tate Liverpool’s summer blockbuster show pairs the work of Egon Schiele and Francesca Woodman. Both the Austrian expressionist painter and American photographer were concerned with the naked human form and with self-portraits, and both died in the their 20s. Life In Motion highlights the expressive nature of the human body, seen through the eyes of the two influential and innovative artists. Schiele, a protégé of Gustav Klimt whose work drew tens of thousands to Tate Liverpoo

Remember Anthology, the series of immersive promenade performances created by the Everyman in conjunction with Slung Low Theatre Company? You were handed an item (a wooden spoon, a bootlace, that kind of thing), put on a pair of headphones and set off on a mysterious journey around the streets of Liverpool. Well the Leeds-based company is back in town, in an audacious and hugely ambitious collaboration with what appears to be the entire student population of LIPA – certainly

Many venues now precede their show with tannoy requests to turn off your mobile phone, or a stern warning about no photography. But at the Epstein Theatre this week the disembodied voice is instead alerting audiences to “strong language and scenes of a sexual nature”. And it’s a warning the faint (and pure) of heart should probably heed. The Salon, making its Hanover Street debut after several successful runs along the road at St Helens Theatre Royal, is somewhat lewd, often

The 1980s were bookended by two great cinematic slices of audience wish-fulfilment. One was in 1987 when Patrick Swayze opined that ‘nobody puts Baby in the corner’, before dirty dancing off in to the sunset with Jennifer Grey. And the other came five years earlier, when Richard Gere’s dashing aviation officer swept Debra Winger’s feisty factory worker in to his arms and away from her mundane life in the paper mill. All roads in An Officer and a Gentleman, receiving its inaug