UK REGIONAL THEATER REVIEWS

The stage adaptation of Jacqueline WIilson's novel is a lovingly put-together blend of comedy, tragedy and circus performance....

Woman In Mind is thought of as one of Alan Ayckbourn's best works. It is the English playwright's 32nd play and his earliest using a first-person narrative. The plot centres around Susan who, having hit herself in the head with a garden rake, is found at the start of the play concussed on her garde...

Gary Naylor sees a beautiful but sad cabaret based on the life of Mata Hari the woman shot by the French Army for spying whose short life contained more dramas than a hundred others....

The 1980s sitcom revival tour hits Sheffield...

Gary Naylor sees a play overly determined by its length and its extreme loudness, a victim of the ambition of a young company that will come back stronger and wiser for the experience....

Gary Naylor sees a delightful resurrection of one of English comedy's founding fathers - the coarse, warm, funny Tristram Shandy, the creation of Irish clergyman Laurence Sterne....

Gary Naylor sees a terrifyingly uncompromising play about women held away from their hopes, their dreams, their desires, distinguished by some brilliant acting and fine use of the venue's tiny, oppressive, space....

Every Day theatre company's The Love Project, which has recently completed its tour across the UK, is an hour-long one-act production that explores different attitudes to love. It's a verbatim piece which uses dialogue and body language from interviews with a range of real-life testimonies....

Gary Naylor sees a Lear who walks among us as her (yes, this Lear is a woman) mind comes and goes and her daughters squabble over the prizes she so foolishly has allocated. There are lessons too - for state and family - today....

Gary Naylor sees a new play, with lots of music, dancing and singing, set in a traditional Lancashire village as love blossoms, war looms and everyone pays a price....

Gary Naylor sees a production of a play about what the United Kingdom means to its peoples, the first London production for 37 years, but timely in 2014 when such questions arise again, albeit in a completely different context....

Gary Naylor sees a timely revival of Bradley Rand Smith's adaptation of Dalton Trumbo's cri-de-coeur novel centred on a soldier left with just a mind and a torso by a shell on the battlefield of 1918. 70 minutes of intense exploration of a broken man's mind follows....

Eclipse Theatre Company's production of the Tony Award-winning Sizwe Banzi is Dead is currently on a brief national tour after its Young Vic run. The 95-minute one-act play focuses on the lives of two men - Styles and Sizwe Banzi - in apartheid-era South Africa....

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller has been dubbed one of the greatest literary works of the 20th Century. The book was published in 1961 followed by a feature film in 1970 directed by Mike Nichols. The story is set in World War II and focuses on a group of US Army Air Force men - one in particular called Ca...

It makes a change for a farce to take centre stage at the Crucible, but Sheffield Theatres are celebrating this summer with their take on Boeing Boeing, Marc Camoletti's classic comedy about a man trying to keep up three relationships with air hostesses...

Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story - has been seen by over 22 million people worldwide and has since been dubbed 'the world's most successful rock'n'roll musical'. Within his short two year career, he wrote some supremely iconic music and influenced successive artists who wished to follow in Buddy's foot...

The National Theatre's production of One Man, Two Guvnors is currently on an extensive tour of the country. This version stars Gavin Spokes as Francis Henshall, the man caught between two guvnors, and he is ably supported by a cast of familiar faces, including three former EastEnders stars (Jasmyn B...

Possibly today's coolest show in London, Lin Manuel-Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes's stunning rap musical inpires a generation to learn rumba break dancing....

Gary Naylor sees one of Shakespeare's greatest plays told from the perspective of the women and finds that they are rather different when talking amongst themselves than when they speak to their menfolk....

Aletia Upstairs presents MATA HARI....

30 years since the miners' strikes, this touring production of Brassed Off offers the audience much to laugh at, much to ponder and a good dollop of brass band music....

Gary Naylor sees one of Sir Noel Coward's less performed works staged in exactly the right venue for its mix of light comedy, gentle suspense and tremendously witty songs....

Gary Naylor sees a German play that provokes thought, disgust and a certain admiration, but proves very hard work with such an uncompromising script and such committed performances....

Gary Naylor sees a play about thinkers thinking about sex and finds that it fails to reach a climax. The superstar male professor is often the object of bright young things' desires....

Gary Naylor sees a rarely performed version of Hamlet and finds it set four or five years in the future and not 450 years in the past...