Review: MAZEPPA, Grange Park Opera
by Aliya Al-Hassan - June 16, 2025
Even ardent opera fans may struggle to recall the story or the score for Mazeppa. Based on a poem by Pushkin, Tchaikovsky's opera has been unjustly overshadowed by his Eugene Onegin. Last staged at the London Coliseum in 1984, Grange Park Opera have landed a coup by engaging the English National Ope...
Review: HAMLET HAIL TO THE THIEF, Royal Shakespeare Theatre
by Cindy Marcolina - June 15, 2025
It was only February when we headed to Stratford-upon-Avon to review Hamlet, so it comes as quite the surprise to head through green fields speckled with sheep for the same play a mere four months later. Elsinore might have been a massive moving ship back then, but it’s receiving an astonishing over...
Review: A MIDSUMMER NIGHTMARE, Keats House
by Kat Mokrynski - June 16, 2025
Midsummer Nightmare, created by Midnight Circle Productions, is a Gothic adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is currently touring outdoor spaces in the UK. The particular performance I attended was in the garden of Keats House, which works perfectly as the poet John Keats who live...
Review: FLUMPS, Mercury Theatre
by Jess Ashley - June 11, 2025
Fancy something sweet? Flumps, the debut full-length play by Essex writer Emma Jo Pallett, has arrived at the Mercury Theatre’s Studio. Originally performed at Colchester Fringe in 2022, Pallett’s dark comedy has since been in development with the Mercury, now becoming their brand-new Studio Origina...
Review: SAUL, Glyndebourne Festival
by Aliya Al-Hassan - June 09, 2025
Just how much fun can you have at an oratorio about a Old Testament tale of jealousy, madness and death? Well, quite a lot as it happens at the return of Barry Kosky's remarkable production of Handel's Saul. This staging is opera at its most theatrical, with severed heads, a breast-feeding witch, a ...
Review: MADAMA BUTTERFLY, Grange Park Opera
by Aliya Al-Hassan - June 09, 2025
Grange Park Opera has opened its new season with a crowd-pleaser. Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly remains problematic, with its story of a Japanese teenage geisha, impregnated and cruelly abandoned by an American lieutenant. However, it is still wildly popular, mainly due to its ravishing score....
Brighton Fringe Review: TALKING TO MARGERY, BN1 Arts Centre CIC
by Kat Mokrynski - June 04, 2025
A medieval mystic and a scribe walk into a 21st-century dorm room . . . No, that’s not the start of a joke. It’s the beginning of Talking to Margery, a play written and directed by Zoë Alexander in which famed mystic Margery Kempe (Denise Evans) and her devoted scribe (Jamie Izzet) somehow end up in...
Brighton Fringe Review: NAMASTE BLISTERS, Half A Camel - The Joker
by Kat Mokrynski - June 03, 2025
As someone who used to be obsessed with yoga, I knew that I wanted to see Namaste Blisters, a comedy show written and performed by Kym Nelson, a former yoga teacher, that promises to reveal the “stereotypes, secrets and absurdity of the yoga industry.”...