On paper, it’s red-hot. Capitalise on the Jubilee / Will & Kate / Royal Baby mania with a show starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth Regina (again) backed by the writer and director of The Queen and a neat concept: a series of era-hopping sequences giving us a backstage pass to the Queen’s weekly audience with the Prime Minister.
A group of old codgers drinking in a pub. A questionable doctor and his coquettish nurse. A work-experience lad languishing in a stale newsroom. A young boy with a penchant for kicking pigs. These are the characters that populate the bizarre world of Kill The Beast’s new production of The Boy Who Kicked Pigs.
A potentially big problem for any little voice is that the production risks being unbalanced by the very thing you likely bought your ticket for in the first place: scene stealing sequences in which a mighty songstress rips forth from a delicate frame. While Jess Robinson delivers on this (and finds space to provide LV with a wry humour) all of this would to naught if there wasn’t a great supporting cast – and, for that matter – plot – to populate the world that Little Voice is so desperately attempting to avoid.
Sixty years ago, according to Maurice, he met a beautiful young woman on the eve of her becoming a Queen. Apparently she promised to look him up if she was still on the throne in 2012.
There’s a point in many circus acts when the ringmaster, introducing the next death-defying act, calls for absolute silence, warning that even the slightest slip or miscalculation could result in injury, dismemberment, or even death. There’s no chance of that in Circus of Horrors, and not just because it’s a couple of hours of lots of sound and fury.
For the legions of science fiction fans that descended on London’s ExCel Centre, the weekend of October 19th to 21st meant just one thing: for the first time in Trekker convention history all five captains from the TV incarnations of Star Trek were to gather for a public appearance, to celebrate fifty years of a cultural phenomenon.
Ross Noble, a man who has forged a living from going off on a tangent, brought his Mindblender show to Brighton last night.
You get the impression that if Jon Richardson worried less about the audience liking him, he’d have them eating out of his hand. Which, no doubt, would be spotless.
When Arthur Wing Pinero, the Victorian theatre world’s ultimate funny-man, wrote his very own ‘woman with a past’ problem-play, no-one could have predicted its immense success. Or, for that matter, its subsequent vanishing into obscurity.
The script is a dazzling theatrical mosaic that requires Simon Callow to play no less than 49 separate characters.