CityLife

I only caught this towards the end of its run but I found the whole piece very ordinary. A hard working cast battled through the oceans of dialogue, often facing force 10 cliches and being buffeted by squalls of shallowness. This seems to be a cross between the worst of Loose Women meets the worst of Sex in the City.........with characters who I wanted to care about but couldn't.

Having read Alan Hulme's review I had low expectations of this performance. How wrong I was, it is an excellent innovative and fresh approach to the play. The device of using the 1960's contrasting the Court as the Greek Colonels with the "hippy" feel of the fairyland works superbly with the sets allowing innovative use of all the theatre space by the energetic and excellent cast. Gloomy one minute, vibrant the next, the production takes us through the range of emotions that the play allows. Was there ever a sexier relationship between Titania and Bottom? The Mechanicals are hilarious and the pair of lovers enagaging. The cast all deliver the lines with clarity and meaning. To describe the performance as "tedium" and " a slow motion train crash" as Alan did is just complete nonsense. I suspect he either needs to check his medication or take more water with it before attempting another review. Ignore it and go and see the prodcuction, it's excellent.

Sport at its best is a heady mixture of passion, laughter, tears, disappointment and triumph. It provides a distorting mirror to “real” life, echoing the challenges of day to day living but providing a set of rules where the winners or losers are easily defined. Using the tale of Bolton Wanderers progress to the first Wembley FA Cup final this wonderful production engages on all levels; the comic passion of the loyal supporters, the sense of belonging whilst stood on the terrace with other fans, the brief Saturday distraction taking people away from the cares of the everyday. With fine performances all round from an excellent cast we are taken on a wave of hope as the team progress through the rounds of the Cup, treading the narrow line between success and failure. The challenges of economic downturn, the still raw personal loss of the World War and the excitement of building new lives together are sidelined, but never eliminated, as the Cup run unfolds. At the end of the day this play is about the strength and power of community. The political activist might struggle to get people to his meetings and the church group might get attendance through duty rather than desire, but the supporters linking arms on the Wembley touchline illustrate the true potential of people coming together for common cause. So whether you are a Bolton fan, a football fan, or neither, if you have a soul this play will speak to you. Magnificent.

If I needed a production to put my mind at rest that the Library theatre company would retain their wonderfully high standards after their eviction from their old home then this was it. How can you sum up a play like this? How about brilliant, challenging, funny, sad, engaging and memorable. A great play, great cast, great production. You might guess from this that I enjoyed it! For a play that lasts almost three hours (including the interval) the production never drags, with twists and turns in both plot and ideas building one upon the other to weave a magical night.

Written in an era when so many of the old certainties were falling apart this is a fascinating and challenging glimpse at the moment that the comedy tectonic plates started to move. Working class men unable to use their feet or fists to fight their way out of their allotted lives see stand up comedy as their chance to move on. Learning the skill at evening classes introduces them to Eddie Waters, the old time comedian who challeges them to reject the cheap laugh found by exploiting the racial, sexual or national stereotypes. But when opportunity knocks for them to get on the club circuit they are confronted by Bert Challenor, the antithesis of Waters, who wants the comics to pile it high and sell it cheap. Audiences, to Challenor, are a stupid rabble, to be fed the lines that wrap them in comforttable prejudice. And the Comic’s role is is meet this demand, like a factory working pushing the right buttons. Comedy is not important, its simply entertainment, putting bums on seats. The brilliance of this play is how it presents each Comic with this choice and explores how they react. Stick to principles or sell out? And whose principles are they anyway? This production presents these challenges and many more. The recation of the audience is fascinatiing as the sterotypical jokes that were born in the 1970s got laughter from some and sharp intakes of breath from others. Were the audience reacting to the joke itself or the reaction to the joke of their fellow audience menbers? The cast is uniformally excellent but special praise for Richard Moore as Waters, Hugh Higginson and particularly Kieran Hill, whose powerful, threatening and disturbing portrayal of a Comic rejecting the mainstream in favour of an alternative Grock-like clowing is a fine addition to the list of superb work he has delivered in North West theatre this year. Waters challenge, .....do you just want to be famous, or do you want to be Good, ..... should be asked of any aspiring X factor or talent show aspirant. Relevant when written and relevant now.

A tour de force of stage tricks and illusions give this production the "wow" factor, but the direction never allows the fun and games to override the deeper aspects of this tragic morality tale. Great performances all round mixing tenderness with the physical to create a memoerable night. I'd tell people to sell their soulds for a ticket for this.................

Take a handful of superb actors, a cracking script, and place them in a production that drives the dialogue forward at 100 miles an hour and you get this wonderfully mesmerising dip into 1980s workplace morality. The cast take us into the lives of the self-interested, manipulative but ultimately vulnerable salesmen who circle each other in a game of "who has the biggest" (sales). Like a shiver of cannibal sharks the players circle each other, forced to lie, cheat, bribe and steal to survive. The successful prosper (or at least get a new car) whilst the weakest are cast aside. Brilliant performances all round but special mention for Richard Dormer for a magnificently snake-like Richard Roma, top salesman but worthless human being. The saddest remark of the night I overheard was as the audience left the theatre. A tired looking besuited chap in his 20s/30s turned to his companion and said "it still like that in the sales office now...." We may not all be Thatcher's children but we still walk in the landscape she created.

As with all Neil Simon plays the challenge facing the cast is to not allow the superb words to swamp the dramatic connections between the characters. This production achieves this and more. Stuart Fox is excellent as the father who walked out on his family, being both infuriating and engaging as the play develops. Elizabeth Carling plays his long term (but not full time) girlfriend with just the right balance of sassy and vulnerable longing. And great praise to Kirsty Osman who turns in a brilliant performance as the feisty but brittle daughter who seeks out her estranged father to try and help her understand her past, and ends up rescuing him. As a debut on the professional stage it is staggeringly good. The only sour(ish) note for me was provided by an audience member who decided to talk to his companion during the first half, which distracted quite a few people in the audience. Maybe people who feel the need to do this (and the problem is one I've come across a number of times) could have the courtesy to just shut up! But this was the only blot on an otherwise splendid performance

An interesting but, in my opinion, a flawed play, in which some really excellent moments compete with some less than believable ones. Too often we were presented with characters lacking a sense of reality in either words or actions, and whilst the world of the classroom was interestingly portrayed, when school life bumped up against the non-school world I found the play struggled to make the action or words seem real. The first half of the play in particular seems to struggle to make it’s mind up what it wants to be. Whilst drama is often leavened by lighter moments, this production seems to set these two aspects against each other, so that far from one illuminating the other the effect is to leave you thinking there were two plays in the piece trying to get out. I found the second half more cohesive, and overall this one is worth a watch. I also found it a little off-putting that many in the (mostly student aged) audience appeared to act as if they were watching “Carry on Teaching”, laughing wildly at the humour (and sometimes at things which were not, I assume intended to be funny) whilst seemingly unaware of the deeper aspects of the story as it unfolded. At times it was a bit like sitting in a 6th form end of year drama show where the kids in the audience over-react to their mates on stage. And that was a pity because some of the performances from the mostly young cast were good. Particular praise for Shannon Tarbet who plays the young daughter of the female teacher with wonderful intensity. Overall then definitely worth seeing but a 3 rather than 5 star production.

Shakespeare seems to me to be a bit like Marmite. People seem to either love or loathe his plays. I’m never sure that those who profess love are doing so to present a “cultured” image or whether those that loathe him have actually seen many (if any) live productions of his work. So lets try and ignore the reputation of the author of this play, and all the baggage that brings, and see how the production stands on its own. I think the Comedy of Errors is basically a rip-roaring farce, where belief is suspended as we are asked to accept that two sets of twins, separated in early childhood land up in the same place, with, as the blurb writers say “ Hysterical comic consequences”. And it works. The plot is so outrageous it allows the actors to go completely over the top. This brought (in the performance I saw) gales of laughter from a mostly young audience as the story works up to its somewhat “kitch” conclusion. Yes, some of the words could have been spoken better (the cast would have benefited from having watched the recent production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at Bolton where the diction was superb) and, yes, the play’s “plot setting” early scenes seem to slow up the tale for a modern audience. But the energy and shear fun that the cast bring to this production makes it a wonderful fun night out.