Sitting In The Cheap Seats

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was last year’s must-see musical in the West End, with audiences and critics lapping up the jokes and raving about Robert Lindsay’s performance. Predictably I didn’t see it, but when it closed I felt pretty sure it would be out on tour before too long so I made a point to catch it at The Mayflower and see what all the fuss was about.

A play by David Mamet that pays tribute to Oscar Wilde… sounds like an odd concept, but Boston Marriage manages to blend the best of both writers, Mamet’s snappy dialogue married to Wilde’s verbose grandeur!

Shakespeare has loomed large over London’s theatre scene in 2015, from the fevered anticipation to Benedict Cumberbatch’s performances in (the underwhelming) Hamlet to Kenneth Branagh forming his own company and presenting a series of plays built around a pair of the Bard’s pieces. With such fanfare the RSC’s return to the Barbican with the last of their King and Country cycle (and later the whole cycle in repertory) has almost slipped in under the radar, but the less heralded shows are, in our experience, often the most rewarding…

Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has confirmed that Michael Morpurgo’s Running Wild will open its 2016 season in an adaptation by Samuel Adamson, running from 13 May – 12 June.  In a co-production with Chichester Festival Theatre, who originally created the piece with their youth theatre, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre will fully develop the play to launch its professional premiere. Timothy Sheader and original Chichester director Dale Rooks direct with puppetry design and direction by Finn Caldwell and Toby Olié, both previous Associate Puppetry Directors on War Horse.