Julia Knight took to the stage on her birthday with Songs of Joy & Justice, a thoughtfully structured cabaret blending wit, social commentary and musical skill. The show unfolds as a sequence of songs themed around joy and justice, with Knight accompanying herself on the keyboard almost throughout. Humour runs as a constant thread, inviting easy comparisons to Victoria Wood—a connection Knight acknowledges directly by including two of Wood’s songs in the programme. The set mo

The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show celebrates its 20th anniversary at this year’s Brighton Fringe with a lively collection of short-form theatre. The show offers a series of vignettes, short scenes of new writing. These are designed to entertain, of course, but in some cases may serve as a springboard for full-length productions. The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show offers two different versions of performances – the ‘Early Riser’ and ‘Late Brekkie’, with the audience being offered

Climate change has had a devastating impact already on the 21st century. Politically, a combination of wilful refusal and culpable neglect is exacerbating the crisis before our very eyes. Devastating images of floods, fires and more fill our networks from around the world – events from which nobody is immune, not even in the well-heeled surroundings of Los Angeles… It’s January 2025 and wildfires are taking hold in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Erin Hunter is living in L

Carly (Kathryn Mincer) sits alone, nervously broadcasting to the outside world. An agitated man pounds at the door. She is fraught, but determined to complete The Final Episode of her podcast. We rewind just six weeks to find the same woman in a quite different state: confident and amiable, at the outset of her launch into broadcasting work. With modest expectations, she is surprised to realise that she has, somehow, tapped into a cultural mood. Her audience numbers surge bey

Lucy Roslyn delivers a performance masterclass in BoonDog Theatre’s production of Lovett. The show explores the origins of Eleanor, before she became Sweeney Todd’s partner. Widowed, she is confronted daily by the battle for survival. 19th Century London is a challenging place to be impoverished: workhouses, crime and cholera abound. Resourceful and formidable, she draws upon those skills learned from her whaler father, a courtesan mother and a butcher husband. The arc of her

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Northern Soul is a dance and music movement that formed in the north of England over half a century ago, drawing heavily on Motown. Its influence endures, which brings us to Two-Stroke: The Northern Soul Musical—a production inspired by the movement. It’s 1986, and three teenagers (Fizz Lewis Marlton, Ellie Warne, and Freya Mackay Blake) are in rebellious mood, heading to a scooter rally on the Isle of Wight in search of hedonism, freedom, and escape. Inevitably, not everyth

The last light of a balmy May evening filters through the beautiful stained-glass windows of St Mary’s Church, lending an atmospheric backdrop to Something Underground’s ambitious solo show History Has No Safe Word. The premise is hardly straightforward. A once formidable and renowned college professor (Nathan) is now in decline. He suffers from sleep deprivation. While being observed in a clinical trial, he begins to speak in his sleep - but in an ancient language that he se

There is a light and whistle for attracting attention.” A phrase that rings with easy familiarity for anyone who chooses air travel. But why is it the title of a piece of theatre? The copy for this production was a little opaque – to the point that it felt deliberate. Which, of course, turned out to be the case in this simply brilliant production by Play Nicely Theatre. The stage is set, intriguingly, with a chest of drawers and small wooden boxes off stage left and right. Th

Tish (Letitia Delish) is stuck. In more or less every sense of the word, in fact. She is increasingly uncertain of her gender and wishes to explore nascent alternative sexuality. Tish is studying musical theatre in Bognor Regis, hardly a hotbed of cosmopolitan acceptance or tolerance. And then there’s also rent to pay. A chance encounter on Grindr (a dating and social app, popular with the LGBTQ+ community) pushes her into highly unexpected territory. Tish decides to become a

Identity confusion sits at the heart of this re-telling of G. K. Chesterton’s best-known novel. Chesterton is probably most famous as the creator of Father Brown to the modern audience, but this is an intriguing revival of The Man Who Was Thursday with modern resonance. The year is 1908 and Europe is witnessing political upheaval, which will ultimately lead to the outbreak of World War I. A variety of groups are pushing for reform and governments are increasingly under p

"Are you having a stroke?" Not exactly what inventor Jim (Paul Richards), pitching an idea to his long-term girlfriend Alison (Ruby Florence), wants to hear. But this does not transpire to be Alison’s most devastating line to Jim; it is, however, a microcosm of the personality gap between the pair. The Half A Camel (the upstairs function room of The Joker) is set with a typical domestic scene, except that Jim is miming to Queen’s We Are The Champions , as part of his morning

How well can you ever really know anyone? How much do we fundamentally understand about someone, and what are the masks and defences we all employ? A stage solely occupied by a keyboard and microphone greets us at the BN1 Arts Centre. But the Dubious Company’s eclectic cast - Emily Hawkins, Jasper Price, Lex Bluecairn, Aoife Pallister Begadon, Annalena Lipinski, Amber Williams and Aisling Hanrahan - soon fill the space, singing and playing, leaning into the style of the moder

The Great Depression really started with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. More than merely a recession, it hit everybody in the USA and its contagion spread across the globe (akin to Metternich’s famous “When France sneezes, Europe catches cold”). Its socio-economic effects were devastating. It was a contributory factor in Hitler’s rise to power, though that’s another story. It’s thought that the USA only really emerged from this by setting its economy onto a war footing duri

Should we talk about the impact of the digital world on human beings ? On a macro level, there are grave concerns about the influence of the internet on democracies and the threat of cyber attacks upon institutions, industry and, Heaven help us, nuclear power plants. On-line platforms can amplify views and prejudices, gaining traction exponentially, sometimes with tragic and unforeseen consequences. But Tim Arnold’s seismic Super Connected instead examines the effect of dig

William Macready lived a life less ordinary, of this there is no doubt. Born towards the end of the eighteenth century, the son of an actor, he had high hopes of going to Oxford and eventually taking up a position at the bar. Many actors in current times struggle to make ends meet and it was not especially different for Macready’s father, who ended up in a debtor’s prison. This brought about a series of related events, resulting in William Macready having to leave Rugby and s

Barking Hearts Theatre’s production of El Viaje (The Journey) intertwines live music, singing and story-telling. It is utterly charming. But we need to contextualise first and to do so, a lightning recap of Cuban history, at least concerning the latter half of the last century. Fulgencio Batista had been elected Cuban leader, but later suspended the constitution and effectively became the head of a military dictatorship. His secret police brutally suppressed any dissenting

The philosopher Santayana observed that those who fail to heed the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. But if time travel were to be possible, could humankind step back from calamitous, self-destructive, actions ? And crucially, even if they could, would they ? The Lantern Theatre setting is a plain black space, with what appears to be various items of junk in the background. Dryskoll (Malcolm Galea) has been sent back in time as part of an orchestrated attempt t

Every life is a series of days. We enter Rotunda Theatre’s Squeak auditorium to find no set at all : we are presented with a sparse, black space. Christopher Sainton-Clark appears on stage and immediately has the audience in his grip: there is a mortal struggle taking place and he pauses to tell us that this is the story of his death. What follows is the tale of Nathan, a young man in a small town in Ireland in 1958. There was precious little money around : Nathan’s parents b

It’s not news that planet Earth finds itself in a perilous state right now. The issue that successive Governments just will not tackle is that of climate change. They mostly seem to understand though, painfully agreeing wordings of various edicts. The aim of The Paris Agreement was to keep global temperature rises this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, scientists seem to be in agreement that this remains unlikely : IPCC scientists, in a curr