Sam Morrison’s stand-up comedy show Sugar Daddy hilariously points out some of the foibles and absurdities of the gay community. It also tackles more serious issues such as the culture's intolerances, particularly when he reflects on his own attraction to older men with bellies. Beneath these sharp observations, however, the true centre of the monologue is Morrison's grappling with the loss of his partner during the Covid-19 pandemic. The show runs for only sixty minutes, yet Morrison traces his relationship with Jonathan from their first awkward meeting in Provincetown to the final leave-taking in hospital and the amusingly complicated scattering of the ashes. Along the way, the audience shares a remarkable emotional roller coaster. There are tender moments recalling time spent with Jonathan on a rooftop, weirdly funny episodes such as when Morrison is attacked by seagulls, and painfully vivid recollections of the speech delivered at Jonathan’s deathbed. The humour is dark an...

In 2011, Ryan Craig wrote a play about the first Gaza war of 2009. The work carries an even deeper resonance in today’s fraught political climate. David Rosenberg once ran a successful Jewish catering business, but he has fallen on hard times after a rumour spread through the neighbourhood that his food caused a woman’s death by food poisoning. His wife Lesley believes they should leave the area that has now turned its back on them, but David is determined to restore his reputation. The fact that their son died defending Israel is seen as a way of re-establishing the family’s standing among those around them. Yet their daughter’s involvement in an inquiry that may bring charges against the Jewish state for its conduct during the 2009 Gaza war threatens this fragile hope of acceptance. The family’s predicament becomes a microcosm of a larger dilemma. At what point do the rewards of belonging to a family, a community, or a nation demand a loyalty that endangers personal integrity, and ho...

When a young actor is engaged to impersonate a ghost strolling around the grounds of a stately home, he is told that he has been hired to amuse the owner’s nieces. It soon becomes clear, however, that nothing is quite what it first appears. Tim Foley’s supernatural tale is full of twists, and this confident production delivers them with flair. Sound and projection are used imaginatively to generate the expected shivers, while Neil Bettle’s design makes striking use of the space, conjuring an atmosphere thick with suggestion. Paragon House is full of secrets, and the staging beautifully establishes its engaging sense of haunted mystery. The piece unfolds essentially as a short story recounted by its protagonist, and the burden of drawing the audience in rests almost entirely on a single performer. George Naylor plays Joe, an aspiring writer/actor hired to circle the grounds of the grand house whose doors remain firmly closed to him. Naylor’s performance is articulate and strongly projec...

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...