Sitting In The Cheap Seats

For some Christmas begins when they leave the office for the last time before the holidays. For others it’s the moment the Coca-Cola advert starts running on the TV. For me Christmas begins with a Chichester Festival Youth Theatre production. This is my third and every year I’m blown away by the talent and professionalism on display.

It’s that time of year again, when critics, theatre writers and bloggers all put together their lists of the shows that have most impressed them this year, so after a great deal of thought here are our top 10 productions (that we reviewed) of 2015!

The BFG is perhaps the most beloved of Roald Dahl’s brilliantly twisted stories for children (though theatre fans may have fallen for Matilda in recent years). It’s certainly one that people keep coming back to as the forthcoming movie adaptation (starring Mark Rylance – which excites us a great deal) will attest. I’m fascinated to see how Humdrum bring such a big story into the confines of The Spring’s cosy studio theatre.

‘ It’s not been a good end to the year for me… I returned from a much needed holiday in September with a torn hamstring that made sitting in one place for any length of time agony. It started to heal and I re-tore it. Just when I’m back to fighting fitness I manage to go and contract pneumonia! So, 2015 is not ending the way I had hoped and I’m missing out on a lot of good theatre (as is MyTheatreMates co-founder Mark Shenton who wrote about his own injury here ). That said, being laid up on the sofa has allowed me to keep my head above water with the volume of theatre news emerging lately, so I thought this would be a good time to start my new weekly round-up of what is happening in the West End and beyond…

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…