Reviews on The Review

The description of Richard Bean’s The Heretic as a ‘hilarious comedy’ rings true in The Library Theatre’s current production. Eccentric characters, clever scripting and an original angle all contribute to the success of the play, which received much audience appreciation throughout. Telling the story of Dr Diane Cassell, the black sheep of the science department [...]

The Country Wife – Royal Exchange, Manchester
Naya Tsentourou

It’s not often that Restoration comedy arrives in Manchester. When it does, however, the genre’s poignant social critique, its unconventional values, and its celebration of playhouses find in the city’s culture a perfect fit. Polly Findlay’s production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, first performed in 1675 [...]

Lost Memory of Skin conveys the reader out of their comfort zone and into that area that all good fiction aspires to inhabit, full of challenging ideas and questions that brook no easy answers.
In the opening scene, the central protagonist, the Kid, visits a Florida library and asks to use the internet. This may not [...]

Lawrence’s play The Daughter-in-Law is widely held to be one of the most important British plays written between the 1890s and the 1950s. Productions are not exactly ten a penny, so this one by Library Theatre at the Lowry was very welcome. Though excellent in some respects it did show that we still don’t have [...]

Charting the travails of a call-centre salesman suffering under a demented boss, Socrates Adams’ enviable debut takes its place in a line of bleak workplace satires that runs from ‘Bartleby’ through to Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, something like Douglas Coupland but far more surreal and far, far funnier.
The novel begins with Ian, the hapless narrator, [...]

The Lowry restaurant overlooking Salford Quays is completely packed. An attractive young waitress whose nametag reads ‘Rachel’ seats me at a table with eight strangers. The small talk commences – everyone is excited about this experimental play, one of six to be selected for the Library Theatre Company’s Re:Play Festival which features the best of [...]

Ian Winterton’s gritty drama about a prostitute trying to hide her shady career while caring for her younger sister was first seen at last summer’s 24:7 festival before moving onto the Edinburgh fringe. The play’s title Sherica is taken from the false name assumed by the leading role as she goes about her secret life [...]

Dreams of a Life: dir. Carol Morley

Dreams of a Life is a mesmerising film. It’s beautiful photography seems almost to belong to a different film, and it’s exquisite pacing and narrative arc show Carol Morley to have an iron control over her film.

In part, the film comprises a series of [...]

When I told my friends that I was going to see The Wind in the Willows, a few asked with disdain, “Is it a Christmas production?” They warned me that ‘tis the season for haphazard affairs thrown together for children who don’t know better and their desperate parents. I went to The Lowry with rather [...]

Two or three thin, reedy notes are looped through the Lyric Theatre’s sound system prior to the evening’s performance of the Donmar’s King Lear, they alternate, sometimes create intervals with each other like strange, invisible wind chimes. Audience members are expectant but seem perturbed, no doubt the desired effect of this pre-performance touch. Two middle-aged [...]