Even rock 'n' roll enthusiasts may not immediately recognise the names Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight, yet this delightful musical makes a persuasive case for their inclusion in any contemporary music hall of fame. The show opens as the pair embark on their first joint tour across the segregated Southern states, and their growing sisterhood becomes a neat metaphor for the hybrid sound they helped to shape. The production handles the uneasy relationship between sacred and secular with intelligence. Conversations between the two women explore whether the energy and joy of religious music should be translated into a secular context, and this debate neatly mirrors their own developing relationship. The tension between gospel and the emerging sounds of popular music runs throughout the narrative, but while the history and musicology are intriguing, the real pleasure of the evening lies in the performances themselves. Onstage, the inimitable Beverley Knight is incandescent as...

In 2019, to celebrate its 50th-anniversary season, Scottish Ballet commissioned five new works. The fifth and final of these, Mary, Queen of Scots , is choreographed by the company’s resident choreographer Linda Laplante with an original score by Mikael Karlsson and Michael P. Atkinson. The result is a work of striking theatrical imagination and choreographic ambition. The ballet unfolds in the winter of Elizabeth I’s life. The ageing queen looks back on her turbulent relationship with her cousin Mary and the chain of events that ultimately led to Mary’s execution at Elizabeth’s command. Memory merges with imagination throughout the narrative. While the broad sweep of history remains intact, the work allows itself moments of poetic licence that deepen its emotional resonance. We first encounter Mary at the French court where she marries Francis II. His death leaves her estranged from her formidable mother-in-law Catherine and forces her return to Scotland. She is accompanied by the mus...

James M. Cain’s tale of murder and betrayal remains a classic of hard boiled crime fiction. Younger audiences may not remember Double Indemnity , Billy Wilder’s extraordinary film noir starring Fred MacMurray as the smart aleck insurance salesman drawn into a murderous scheme by the ultimate femme fatale, played by Barbara Stanwyck. In this stage adaptation, Tom Holloway has altered the names of the two central characters slightly, but their personalities remain recognisably the same. As the fast talking operator who is thoroughly outmanoeuvred by a seductive schemer, Ciarán Evans serves as both narrator and protagonist. For the most part he captures the stylised delivery associated with the genre, though there are moments when the performance tips from deliberate artifice into something that feels a little forced. The production also struggles with its central relationship. Mischa Barton cannot quite match Stanwyck’s glacial brilliance, and her seductive power and calculated manipulat...

Savage confronts a historically shocking and distressingly contemporary issue: the targeting of homosexual men with conversion therapy. The play recounts the horrific experiments carried out under the Nazi regime in Denmark to "cure" homosexuality and tells the true story of Dr Vaernet, who collaborated with Hitler’s regime in the belief that sexual orientation could be changed. This historical reality is dramatised through the story of Nikolai, a young Danish man, and his American lover, Zack. While Zack manages to escape the Nazi experiments, Nikolai endures them. Regrettably, this crucial historical legacy is presented simplistically and didactically. The characters are one-dimensional, and the plot is entirely predictable. The revelation that the Nazi persecutor of Nikolai is himself gay is unsurprising. It is almost a cliché that much homophobia is driven by repression of one’s own desires.The play’s simplistic characterisation is exacerbated by the production. Despite ...

When, late in life, Jennifer decides to marry for the first time, she acquires an American stepdaughter, Delilah, who is still grieving for her mother. What follows is a combustible clash of generations and cultures, sharpened by the fact that both women are haunted by the lingering presence of maternal ghosts. The dynamic between the courteous, self-effacing Jennifer and her truculent, self-absorbed stepchild is riveting, and the playwright Anna Ziegler probes the emotional fault lines of this fraught relationship with sensitivity and intelligence. Yet, despite a title borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton , the play stops short of grappling with the weightier existential questions that Eliot’s work evokes. Instead, the drama confines itself to a sharply observed portrait of two women bound together by an unexpected remarriage and struggling to negotiate the uneasy territory it creates. The apex of this uneasy triangle never appears on stage. The husband and father remains a faintl...

The Opera Locos is a curious hybrid of music and mime that delivers occasional flashes of fun but largely settles for a succession of fairly standard, broad slapstick routines. The performers offer competent and at times genuinely enjoyable snippets from well known operas, yet these highlights are loosely stitched together by two rather unengaging love stories. One centres on a drunken tenor gamely attempting to sing “Nessun dorma” from Turandot , while the other follows a singer and his male pupil, whose advances appear awkwardly unrequited. Along the way, the cast spill into the auditorium, enlist the audience in a communal singalong to “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto , and raise their glasses to the “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” drinking song from La traviata . There are also polished renditions of the “Barcarolle” from The Tales of Hoffmann , “Un bel dì vedremo” from Madama Butterfly , and the swaggering “Toreador Song” from Carmen . These operatic showpieces are interspersed with...

Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, was a formidable and visionary writer at the heart of progressive intellectual circles in the nineteenth century. Bird Grove, the house her father purchased and where she lived with him before becoming the figure we recognise today, stands as a potent symbol of the social expectations he harboured for his daughter. Within its walls, she begins her measured, thoughtful rebellion against these constraints. In his play, Alexi Kaye Campbell offers a compelling portrait of a writer forging her identity. As her friend Mrs Bray anachronistically observes, she is finding her own voice. That spirit is captured by Campbell with striking sensitivity; Eliot is at once rational, principled and deeply compassionate. Bird Grove is a refreshingly intelligent play about emotionally intricate characters who must confront profound differences in their attitudes and beliefs, yet strive to do so with dignity and mutual regard. It feels worlds away from so many...

Written in 1888, Miss Julie shocked audiences with its frank portrayal of female sexuality, class transgression and psychological power struggles. Its capacity to disturb and compel has not diminished over time, as it continues to confront issues that resonate in contemporary society. The figure of a sexually exploitative aristocrat still carries uncomfortable echoes today. In Patrick Marber’s 2003 adaptation of the classic, the action unfolds on the eve of Labour’s historic 1945 victory at the polls. Miss Julie celebrates with her father’s chauffeur, John, while his dutiful fiancée, Christine, observes with growing unease. The play opens with the anecdote of Julie’s pet dog mating with the gatekeeper’s mongrel. This episode foreshadows Julie’s own transgressive behaviour, just as her fate is anticipated in the brutal killing of her caged bird when she contemplates eloping with her working class lover. For the drama to succeed, the audience must believe in the volatile, rapid shifts o...

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe , or The Peer and the Peri premiered in 1882 to warm acclaim from critics and the public alike. In 2020 Charles Court Opera unveiled its imaginative reworking of the classic, but the Covid pandemic curtailed its run after only four preview performances. Now returning to London and accompanied by the Charles Court Opera Chamber Orchestra, this judiciously refreshed production deserves nothing less than the wholehearted enthusiasm that greeted the original. The opera’s satire of the House of Lords and the British legal system remains deliciously pointed. When the assembled peers discover that there exists a social order superior to their own, both more capricious and more powerful than they could ever hope to be, their pomposity is punctured with exquisite precision. Within the framework of a tender love story between Strephon, half mortal and half fairy, and his beloved Phyllis, Gilbert deftly and lightheartedly exposes the absurdities of those who presu...

For Harold and his wife Maureen, life has ossified into a bleak, sterile routine until a letter arrives from an old colleague of his who is now terminally ill. On an impulse that surprises even himself, Harold resolves to walk the length of England to see her. What begins as a quixotic gesture becomes a profound pilgrimage of atonement and searching self-reckoning. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is an uplifting modern fable that urges its audience to embrace life's unpredictability and insists, with quiet conviction, that redemption and second chances remain within reach. Mark Addy as Harold and Jenna Russell as Maureen create characters who feel instantly recognisable. Their performances are rich in nuance and emotional truth, investing the story with deep poignancy while never straying into the maudlin. Guiding Harold on his journey as the Balladeer and the spirit of the couple’s son, Noah Mullins brings a nimble vitality and lyrical warmth to the role. The eclectic array...