top of page
Recent News
Archive
Review: Breaking the Code at the Liverpool Playhouse ****
When playwright Hugh Whitemore wrote Breaking the Code 40 years ago, Alan Turing may have been a huge cheese in the development of computing, but his wasn’t a name commonly known among the general public. Consider how much has changed since then, and indeed from 30 years earlier than that when Turing’s life was snuffed out aged just 41 in desperately sad – and still contested – circumstances. Along with Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing, The Enigma and Whitemore’s play, there h
Review: Shostakovich Symphony No.7 at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall ****1/2
‘Keep calm and carry on’ seems to have been the order of the day at the Philharmonic Hall over the weekend. And indeed, if it hadn’t been for the email that popped into hundreds of inboxes on Saturday afternoon mentioning a ‘slight’ change of programme because the Phil’s truck had broken down somewhere between Bristol and Liverpool, no one would have been any the wiser. The main casualty of this unexpected occurrence was Victoria Borisova-Ollas. The poor Swedish composer must
Review: Lost Atoms at the Liverpool Playhouse ****
When a trio of Swansea university students formed a theatre company there in the mid-90s, little could they have imagined that they themselves would one day be studied in turn. But 30 years on, Frantic Assembly is on not one but several curricula, as the huge number of young people in the audience at the Liverpool Playhouse on opening night revealed. The company has a long association with Liverpool. One of its earliest successes was Wirral playwright Michael Wynne’s Sell Out
Review: The Tempest at Shakespeare North Playhouse ****
Earlier this year Shakespeare North Playhouse delivered a gleefully irreverent stag and hen Love’s Labour’s Lost, and before that was a...
Review: Britannia Waves the Rules at the Hope Street Theatre *****
Playwright Gareth Farr’s searing and lyrical Britannia Waves the Rules first roared on to the stage a decade ago, its damaged protagonist...
Review: The Book of Mormon at the Liverpool Empire *****
Ding dong! The Mormons are back in Liverpool with glad tidings – as long as you’re not easily offended that is. Trey Parker, Matt Stone...
Review: Shake it up Baby! at the Epstein Theatre ****
Liverpool playwright Ian Salmon returns to the streets of Hamburg, six years after the all-female Liverbirds rocked the Reeperbahn in his...
Review: Fiddler on the Roof at Liverpool Empire ****1/2
Liverpool art lovers may recall the Marc Chagall exhibition at Tate Liverpool 12 years ago where among the many wonderful paintings on...
Review: The Derby-Days at Liverpool's Royal Court ****
It was teeming outside – both with rain, and with fans who didn’t have tickets for the Merseyside derby at Anfield and were intent on...
Review: The Lightning Thief at the Liverpool Empire ***1/2
More than a quarter of a century after it first burst on the storytelling scene, the ‘young adult’ fantasy fiction genre remains hugely...
bottom of page