Live Art Alive

THE SURGE: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor

The cast of THE SURGE.
Image credit: Tom Visser

Music and Text by Sinead O’Connor

Direction and Choreography by Sonya Tayeh

The Hall, AVIVA STUDIOS

★★★★☆

Whatever it may bring, I will live by my own policies, I will sleep with a clear conscience, I will sleep in peace. If I hope for anything as an artist, it’s that I inspire certain people to be who they really are. My audiences seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are.

Sinéad O’Connor, Rememberings 2021

Few artists have worn their wounds as defiantly as Sinéad O’Connor with a voice that could cradle grief one moment before erupting into righteous fury the next. THE SURGE, premiering in Manchester before moving to New York, creates a compelling tidal pull between the vulnerability and rebellion that defines the essence of both the artist and the woman.

This is dance theatre fuelled less by narrative than by sensation. The movement surges in relentless waves, bodies gathering and scattering as though caught between communion and isolation. At times such as during Tiny Grief Song, bodies ripple and flow like drifting notes scattering across a sheet of music. Sonya Toyeh’s choreography oscillates between explosive physical release and moments of almost unbearable stillness, allowing silence to speak as eloquently as movement. At its best, the company captures the contradictions that made O’Connor such an unforgettable presence: tenderness wrapped in steel, fragility refusing to surrender with a celtic unwillingness to go gently into that good night.

O’Connor’s own narration from her 2021 memoir Rememberings and her glorious music sit at the heart of the evening and are thoughtfully woven into the choreography. Sound and movement converse, each amplifying the emotional resonance of the other. There are passages where the dancers appear almost possessed by rhythm, rather than simply responding to it, creating images that linger long after the lights fade. The lighting design by Tom Visser perfectly complements the choreography and lights the dancers as though they are caught in multiple tableaux from an Annie Leibovitz shoot.

Visually, the production possesses an austere beauty. The stage feels both expansive and intimate, with lighting carving shifting emotional landscapes from shadow and glare. Costumes by Márion Talán de la Rosa avoid easy iconography, hinting at O’Connor’s unmistakable silhouette without reducing her to imitation. The result is an aesthetic that honours her spirit rather than attempting to recreate it.

Jennifer Nugent in THE SURGE
Image credit: Tom Visser.

The ten mature dancers bring their skill and passion, blended with years of technical and life experience to this labour of love and it shows in every nuanced and physically demanding movement. As a ninety minute dance piece, not every sequence lands with equal force. Some extended ensemble passages begin to circle familiar emotional territory, slightly diluting the production’s otherwise fierce momentum. Yet even these quieter moments feel purposeful, reflecting the repetitive cycles of pain, resilience and renewal that shaped O’Connor’s life. In Just Like U Said It Would B they are like whirling dervishs set free in a chapel at midnight. Lisa Race is compelling in I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got while Karine Plantadit seems to fragment during the haunting Tiny Grief Song. Bold, vibrant moments like Red Football and Mandinka have much of the audience yearning to join in.

What ultimately makes THE SURGE so affecting is its refusal to canonise its subject. There is no sanitised martyrdom here. Instead, the work embraces complexity, inviting us to remember a woman who challenged institutions, expectations and audiences alike, often at enormous personal cost. It asks us not simply to mourn Sinéad O’Connor but to consider why voices like hers remain so necessary.

By the closing moments, the stage seems charged with something approaching collective remembrance. The applause that follows feels less like appreciation for technical accomplishment than gratitude for an act of artistic courage. THE SURGE does not attempt to explain Sinéad O’Connor. It honours her by embodying the uncompromising emotional truth she carried throughout her life. Like the woman herself, it refuses to soften its edges, and is all the more powerful for it.

AVIVA STUDIOS 25th 27th June 2026

The Joyce Theater 16th- 27th September 2026

A Long Day’s Journey into Night

Small Theatres

The cast of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Image credit: Elysium Theatre Company

Written by Eugene O’Neill

Directed by Jake Murray

The Empty Space, Salford

There are family dramas and then there is Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s monumental autopsy of love, addiction, regret and the peculiar violence families inflict while insisting they only want what’s best. In Elysium Theatre Company’s touring production, directed by Jake Murray this American classic is stripped back and painfully exposed like an angry, infected wound.

The setting may be a Connecticut summer house in 1912, but the emotional climate is timeless: stifling, storm-heavy and thick with the fog of things left unsaid for too long. Across one increasingly unbearable day, the Tyrone family circle each other like wounded animals, armed with whiskey, morphine, recriminations and a fragile nostalgia.
Murray’s production wisely trusts O’Neill’s text, so there are no gimmicks here, no attempts to modernise or shrink the play’s formidable emotional architecture. Instead, the direction leans into the work’s bruising humanity, allowing its rhythms of affection, accusation and self-deception to unfold with agonising inevitability.

The performances carry the evening’s considerable weight. Joyce Branagh has taken on this substantial and demanding role of Mary Tyrone at short notice, so performs script-in-hand. Despite this, she captures both the ethereal delicacy and terrifying evasiveness of a woman retreating ever deeper into morphine-fogged memory. She drifts through the household like a ghost rehearsing happier versions of herself, all soft smiles, fluttering hands and tremulous denial, while grief and petulant resentment leak through the cracks.
As patriarch James Tyrone, Edmund Dehn does balance bluster with buried shame of his impoverished past and its impact on his family. Beneath the penny-pinching pragmatism lies a man haunted by compromises and squandered artistic promise. The physicality of Dehn convinces but this is a performance that never seems to fully invest in his characters’ rich Shakespearean history to fully grab his role by the teeth and run with it.

It is Elysium stalwart Danny Solomon who dives headlong into his role as elder son, Jamie embracing the cynical and self-destructive character and weaponising dark humour against bitter despair. Daniel Bradford as Edmund has a frail and searching quality. Based on O’Neill himself, Edmund becomes the aching conscience of the piece. Bradford does a good job handling all the monologues and flitting fluidly between Baudelaire, Shakespeare and Nietzsche. Macy Stasiak adds some much needed lightness and energy as Cathleen, the family maid.

What emerges most powerfully is the terrible elasticity of familial love. The Tyrones know exactly how to wound because they know exactly where the wounds already are.
The Empty Space proves an ideal venue for this chamber piece of emotional demolition. Its intimacy denies audiences any safe observational distance.

At nearly three hours, Long Day’s Journey Into Night demands stamina and an armchair but Murrays’ production understands that O’Neill’s play must feel uncomfortably long. The title is not decorative. This is a slow descent from morning optimism into nocturnal despair, where memory becomes both refuge and prison. The past, as O’Neill reminds us, does not stay politely behind us. That said, the production ran over and that is problematic in such a lengthy piece where theatrical goodwill may start to be as watered down as the family whiskey.

A compassionate and earnest revival that honours the grandeur of O’Neill’s masterpiece without ever losing sight of its ordinary human heartbreak.

Tour Dates

Angel’s Bone

Opera, Theatre

Music by Du Yun

Libretto by Royce Vavrek

Directed by Kip Williams

★★★★☆

The Warehouse, AVIVA STUDIOS

English National Opera start their new relationship in Manchester with the UK première staging of Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s 2017 Pulitzer-winning Angel’s Bone in the cavernous warehouse at AVIVA Studios. In the hands of director Kip Williams, this “punk opera” lands like a fever dream somewhere between biblical parable and late-capitalist horror show. Visually stunning and startling, this is an extraordinary and disturbing watch. Even the very setting is an endurance feat of discomfort as the audience stand throughout the performance like silent witnesses or complicit voyeurs.

The story premise alone has the savage simplicity of a mythical allegory that explores modern slavery and human immortality. Two fallen angels crash into a grimy urban world and are discovered by Mr and Mrs X.E. who epitomise the greed and desperation of a couple whose marriage and finances are imploding, and who swiftly realise these celestial creatures can be monetised. Human trafficking becomes both literal and metaphorical here. Innocence is packaged, exploited and sold with the bland efficiency of an online subscription service. The opera never allows the audience the luxury of distance. Its indictment is aimed squarely at the systems we tolerate every day, systems built on consumption disguised as modern civilisation.

Musically, the score is a thrilling assault as Du Yun’s composition ricochets between industrial noise, jagged electronica, liturgical chant and bursts of bruised lyricism. Conductor, Baldeur Brönnimann leads the BBC Philarmonic Orchestra who navigate all the tonal ambushes with astonishing precision, conjuring a soundscape that seems to vibrate through the ribcage rather than merely reach the ear. There is genuine thrill when the Girl Angel Mariam Wallentin erupts into song looking and sounding like Bjork might if her swan Oscar dress had also been hideously defiled. The glorious chorus of Kantos Chamber Choir add to the mix and also serve as the riotous guests who brutalise the angels.

The production’s visual language is equally ferocious. AVIVA Studios proves the perfect setting… cavernous, metallic and emotionally cold, like a warehouse erected on the ruins of empathy itself. The staging weaponises space brilliantly. Scenes emerge from shadow like corrupted memories, while harsh lighting strips the performers bare with interrogation-room cruelty. An inspired revolving set design by Marg Horwell does not always make for clear sightlines but vividly evokes a sleek modern home where nightmare scenarios of gothic horror can unfold.

Allison Cook as Mrs X.E. in Angel’s Bone at AVIVA Studios. Image credit: Tristram Kenton.

Central performances anchor the chaos with bruised humanity. The angels themselves possess an eerie physical fragility, moving as though gravity is something newly inflicted upon them. Their suffering becomes painfully corporeal as they are repeatedly tortured and prostituted. Meanwhile the pair playing Mr and Mrs X.E. chill and with their banal and grotesque greed. Allison Cook stalks the set like a vicious predator wearing her immorality like a blood red dress. These are arresting performances by any standards but the use of 3 live camera operators on stage whose up close, forensic filming is continuously projected on to giant screens is electrifying. Every sweating pore of lust and every gory wound is inescapable.

Angels’ Bone is not trying to soothe or explain. It wants to stain the conscience. By the final moments, the audience stand silently crowding the circular stage, echoing the choral crowd surrounding the grotesque spectacle of the heavily pregnant Mrs X.E. now at the centre of a greedy media circus desperate for the next big story…life echoing art. Rarely has an opera felt so furious, so contemporary, or so unwilling to let anyone off the hook.

AVIVA STUDIOS 12th – 16th May 2026

English Opera North

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Theatre

Writer Hilary Mantel

Playwright Alexandra Wood

LIVERPOOL EVERYMAN

★★★★☆

Politics and theatre have always made for dangerous and unpredictable bedfellows. One deals in illusion, the other in manifesto, and both depend entirely on getting the timing just right. At Liverpool Everyman Theatre, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher arrives carrying enough ideological Semtex to flatten a tabloid newsroom. However, what ultimately gives this adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s notorious 2014 short story its bite is not the provocation of the title but the unnerving humanity beneath it.

The first act unfolds with a dark comedic interplay that feels like watching a sitcom being recorded. Cups of tea are made, curtains twitch, conversations swirl dangerously around uncomfortable subject matter like guests avoiding a murky stain on the carpet. Yet beneath the domestic mundanity sits a slow volcanic rumble of class resentment and exhausted rage. There is a deliciously sureal feel to this scenario where a middle class divorcee expecting a plumber to fix her boiler and instead gets a gunman hellbent on killing the Prime Minister. Under the care of Alexandra Wood, Mantel’s dialogue remains a marvel of weaponised civility.

The production’s two central performances are powerful performances that anchor the evening . Anita Reynolds plays Caroline with a brittle restraint that suggests a woman permanently holding herself together like jewellery beads on a fraying thread. Every clipped sentence feels like a choked dry scream. Opposite her is the would-be assassin Robbie O’Neill who carries himself with an intriguing blend of swagger and sadness: part pub philosopher, part fallen romantic hero. Their scenes together fizz with a strange chemistry as they weigh each other up and find some surprising commonalities.

Robbie O’Neill and Anita Reynolds as Brendan and Caroline in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher at Liverpool Everyman.
Image credit Marc Brenner

What elevates the production beyond an accomplished literary adaptation is the extraordinary tonal shift of the second act. Until then, the Everyman stage feels cramped with suburban realism, all muted anxieties and stale air evoked by the bland domesticity of Ceci Calf’s set. Suddenly the production rips itself open theatrically. Walls vanish, lighting fractures, sound pulses through the auditorium like a national panic attack and bodies start to drop fromthe ceiling. The staging broadens into something almost expressionistic, as though Britain itself has blown apart with uncertain possibilities. It is thrillingly done with the sort of audacious visual pivot that makes audiences physically sit forward.

The transition also sharpens the play’s central question. Thatcher rarely appears directly, yet her presence dominates the room like cigarette smoke clinging to wallpaper decades later. The production wisely avoids easy sanctimony or cartoon villainy. Instead it examines how political ideology colonises ordinary lives, shaping marriages, loneliness, ambition and despair long after the speeches end. This is a play that will resonate regardless of political views. It is premiering in Liverpool, a city who had good cause to loathe Thatcher, it is playing out as other divisive world leaders are subject to assassination attempts and I’m sitting watching this play remembering my own upbringing where fleetingly my local M.P. was the very Bobby Sands that Brendan seeks to avenge.

There are moments where the script threatens to disappear too deeply into its own intellectual labyrinth. A handful of speeches feel more exposition than drama. Yet the cast navigate these passages with enough emotional precision to keep the tension taut.
What lingers afterwards is the queasy recognition that Britain still speaks in Thatcher’s vocabulary even while arguing about her legacy. This production understands that political ghosts do not rattle chains. They sit quietly in kitchens, in boarded-up high streets, in the silence between neighbours. The Everyman has created something both witty and deeply unsettling: a state-of-the-nation drama with frostbite in its veins.

Liverpool Everyman 2nd May – 23rd May 2026

I, Daniel Blake

Theatre

Adapted by Dave Johns from the film directed by Ken Loach, written by Paul Laverty, and produced by Rebecca O’Brien for Sixteen Films.

Directed by Mark Calvert

Written and Adapted by Dave Johns

HOME THEATRE

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This production of I, Daniel Blake is not a period piece thoughtfully adapted from the Ken Loach film. Director Dave Johns ensures that it remains an open, angry wound that has never properly healed and continues to fester. Ken Loach’s landmark film, adapted for the stage, remains a devastating portrait of bureaucratic cruelty, yet this production understands that indignation alone is not enough. It must also find the humanity flickering beneath the paperwork, the humour surviving in the queue, the tenderness that institutions so often ignore.
The story follows Daniel Blake, a joiner recovering from a heart attack who is declared unfit for work by his doctor but not by the job centre, and Katie, a young mother relocated far from home and struggling to keep her family afloat. Their uneasy friendship, born of shared hardship, becomes the emotional spine of the evening. What could feel schematic instead breathes with the lived truth of genuine poverty in Broken Britain.

This production resists any grandstanding or preaching. It does not need to. Its power lies in the detail… the humiliating jargon of assessments, the tinny hold music of endless on phone call queues, the exhausted body language of people forever asked to prove their own desperation and the bleak mono. The direction keeps sentimentality on a tight leash, allowing anger to emerge naturally rather than by theatrical decree.

Jessica Johnson, Jodie Wild and David Nellist in I,Daniel Blake
Image credit: Pamela Raith

The ensemble work is particularly strong, creating a city of strangers who are by turns indifferent, overwhelmed, compassionate and complicit. Kema Sikazwe brings warmth,humour and hope as the young entrepreneur and Jodie Wild is the sweet but never naive beacon of hope for Dan and Katie. Micky Cochrane is electrifying as the angry man applauding Dan’s eventual retaliative outburst. No one is rendered a cartoon villain. Even the agents of the system seem trapped inside machinery too large and too cold to stop. That nuance matters. It reminds us that injustice often wears an ID badge and follows procedure.

At the centre, Daniel is played beautifully by David Nellist with a quiet dignity rather a than a saintly glow. His frustration grows by inches, not explosions, making his eventual acts of defiance all the more moving. Katie, meanwhile, avoids becoming a symbol of noble suffering. Instead Jessica Johnson is funny, proud, sharp, and at times frighteningly close to collapse but always utterly believable in the role. Their scenes together carry the warmth of two people building a tenuous shelter from weather they did not create and certainly cannot control.

Visually, the production is spare but eloquent. Functional sets slide and reshape like official forms endlessly refiled. Public spaces feel exposed; private pain has nowhere to hide. When moments of darkness arrive, they land like stones in water, such as the infamous food bank scene in which the wretched tears fall in darkness and are rendered all the more powerful.

Years after its first appearance, I, Daniel Blake remains a necessary howl against systems that confuse efficiency with morality. This compassionate, clear-eyed production does not simply ask for sympathy. It asks for memory, responsibility, and change. In an age still fluent in cruelty, that feels urgently current.

If there is a limitation, it is that the film’s intimate realism can sometimes sit awkwardly on stage, with certain transitions moving around the stage feeling more dutiful than fluid. Yet the emotional truth survives intact, and often hits harder in a room where collective witnessing becomes part of the drama. The use of the background screen is a powerful tool, used thoughtfully to show the messages and platitudes are still the same regardless of which political party chooses to tweet or advertise their latest slogan on the side of a bus.

HOME MCR 21st – 25th April 2026

Tour Dates

PRIVATE LIVES

Large Theatres

Written by Noel Coward

Directed by Blanche McIntyre

Royal Exchange Theatre

⭐️⭐️⭐️

The wonderfully acerbic sparring of a Noel Coward play will always ensure at least a semi decent night out at the theatre. This new production by Blanche McIntyre rises to the top like a perfectly placed olive in a good Martini. However it perhaps offers one that leaves the audience more stirred than shaken. Here the warring couples may deftly fire their insults but ultimately McIntyre never allows the barbs and violence to descend into palpable danger. It is perhaps telling that by the end, the stage is littered with uncrushed grapes and dainty rolls of cold meat instead of shards of glass and broken ashtrays.

The interplay between Steve John Shepherd and Jill Halfpenny as the couple locked into this love/hate relationship is capable of sparkling like a well cut diamond that can slice through glass but stops short of inciting the full horror of domestic cruelty. Shepherd is excellent dropping comic lines and acerbic asides with perfect timing. All laconic, louche style that perfectly evokes a rakish matinee-idol of the period, he is simply a joy to watch. Jill Halfpenny gives a more inscrutable study of Amanda, at times cool and emotionally distant, then full of kittenish charm before she unleashes some formidable claws. They make for an attractive pairing but their onstage chemistry does not always convince as a couple who can neither live together or be apart.

The unfortunate other spouses in this messy marital ménagerie are Victor and Sybil. Daniel Miller is a perfect foil as the dependable but stuffy “cotton wool Englishman” who embarks on the honeymoon from hell as his bride elopes with her ex and he ends up lumbered with the hysterical Sybil. Shazia Nicholls certainly leans into the shrewish dramatics of an abandoned bride but never fully convinces as the naive young bride wed to an older dashing suitor. The costume designs are on point for the period but somehow make this bride look rather matronly beside the older but much more stylish Amanda. In the final scene Miller finally unravels and rather like Basil Faulty and his very own Sybil, the two spurned partners descend into the marital mayhem as Elyot and Amanda sit back and watch gleefully like tricoteuses at the guillotine.

The set design by Dick Bird perfectly evokes the style and class of the world as seen by Coward. Sleek chrome gleams alongside the sharp black and white decor in the first half while a cosy but messily chic Parisienne apartment is the setting for the couples second attempt at domestic bliss. Both effectively serve a production in the round to illustrate the ring of a wedding band and the circular pattern of a couple locked in the hamster wheel of a toxic relationship. There are however some issues with this revolving set. It can be highly effective in providing some high points of theatrical drama as it moves to the emotional tempo of the production but it is highly frustrating if you end up at other points with half the performers faces obscured by parts of the set.

Private Lives is stylish, intermittently sharp, but ultimately too well-behaved for a play that should leave scorch marks. The laughs are guaranteed given Coward’s ability to write snappy dialogue that still entertains. Yet when violence erupts it fails to shock and gets watered down into clumsy antics where the only truly lasting damage is inflicted on the grand piano. In a modern world so keenly aware of the lasting harm of physical and psychological domestic abuse, McIntyre may feel compelled to be well-behaved and mindful but Coward’s original text was never intended to be morally sanitised.

Royal Exchange Theatre 27th March- 2nd May 2026

The Fire Raisers

Absurdist Theatre, Small Theatres

Written by Max Frisch

Translated by Michael Bullock

Directed by Amy Gavin

HOPE MILL THEATRE

New Manchester company We Merry Dancers light their first theatrical torch with Max Frisch’s incendiary satire The Fire Raisers. Frisch’s parable about a complacent citizen who politely accommodates the arsonists clearly intent on burning down his house remains a deliciously cruel study of denial, civility, and the danger of looking away. A pertinent piece in todays increasingly uncertain political climate this lively, ambitious production leans into the play’s absurdist bite. Performances balance sly comedy with a impending sense of doom, allowing the humour to curdle gradually into something far darker. The central figure of Biedermann is played by Rupert Hill with just the right mixture of puffed-up respectability and blinking naivety, making his eagerness to appease the obvious villains both darkly comic and bewilderingly terrifying.

If the staging occasionally feels a little rough around the edges, the company’s ambition and enthusiasm is always evident. Frisch’s text is razor-edged and needs to be trusted to do its work. Under Amy Gavin’s direction, the production finds a rhythm between comedy and creeping dread. Gavin makes particularly canny use of music to shape the evening’s atmosphere. Musical cues slip in like a knowing wink, sometimes tightening the tension, sometimes puncturing it with a sly release, creating an ebb and flow that keeps the audience alert to the play’s satirical bite. All the main performances lean heavily in to caricature to ramp up the absurd nature of this piece. The stronger actors on stage make this work for a modern audience but some of the cast struggle to balance the demands of absurdist theatre without risking falling into more amateur dramatics territory.

However, the production stumbles with its use of the Chorus. Their choreographed movement feels clunky and oddly amateurish, momentarily pulling focus from the biting text rather than sharpening its commentary. Gavin uses the Chorus of firefighters to introduce current affairs links to this 1953 text. This may be an impassioned attempt to inform the audience but sometimes less really is more, and theatre-makers should trust their audiences to make the connections without guidance. What should feel like a stylised Greek chorus instead often lands as a slightly awkward interruption.

Even so, rough edges are perhaps inevitable in a company’s first outing. What shines through is ambition, intelligence and a clear appetite for politically alert theatre. If this debut is anything to go by, We Merry Dancers might be lighting a fire worth raising.

HOPE MILL THEATRE 11th – 15th March 2026

Kind of Love

Small Theatres

Written and Directed by Stuart Campbell

HOPE MILL THEATRE

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Queerdogs’ Kind of Love wants to dissect love in all its unruly guises, romantic, platonic, obsessive, redemptive, and to do so with a structure that splinters chronology into jagged shards. Set in the late Nineties when New Labour were gearing up to finally change the age of consent for the gay community; the play features four teenage friends navigating love and lust with messy consequences.

Steffan is the archetypal beautiful young gay boy with a big heart and a tender disposition. George Bellamy is convincing and beguilling as this young man falling in love with his school friend Jay. Tom Ryder is Steffans’ childhood friend and his performance convincingly leans into the hyped up masculinity and casual homophobia of his character which makes for a contrasting dynamic in this narrative. However the casting makes for slightly uncomfortable viewing as the actor looks like a mature man rather than a teenage boy who started having sex with girlfriend Gemma when she was underage. Ben Goulding is Jay whose confused choices and actions give rise to the ensuing tragedy in this piece. Here the character feels authentic as a teenager grappling with his sexuality but the writing fails to convincingly show him as someone actually impacted or attuned to outcome of his choices. The most impactful performance is from newcomer Rachel Burbridge as Gemma who anchors all the messy relationships with an authentic emotion integrity.

Rachel Burbridge as Gemma and George Bellamy as Steffan in Kind of Love at Hope Mill Theatre. Image credit: Shay Rowan

The production leans hard into fragmentation. Scenes loop and fracture; conversations restart from alternate angles, characters slip between memory and present tense or recite poetry without warning. It is an intriguing premise, suggesting that love itself is rarely linear and often feels like rummaging through a box of mismatched photographs. Yet the execution proves uneven with the emotional clarity often sacrificed at the altar of cleverness. By the second act, the audience seems less invited to feel and more tasked with assembling a particularly tricky jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the lid. The young ensemble commit wholeheartedly to the material and when the script pauses its structural gymnastics, the performers seize the opportunity to let vulnerability breathe. In these instances, the play finds its pulse and reminds us why we are here: to witness connection, not to decode a puzzle. However as revelations pile up and spiral into further complications, the central relationships risk becoming obscured. Rather than deepening the exploration of intimacy, the convolution occasionally distances us from it. Love may be complicated, but theatre thrives on clarity of stakes, and here those stakes blur into abstraction.

Queerdog are clearly unafraid to experiment, to challenge form, and to refuse easy resolutions. The play may be overstuffed with ideas, but it is never dull. It brims with passion, even when it tangles itself into knots.
In the end, Kind of Love is an intriguing, imperfect exploration of love in its many messy forms. It has some moments of real impact when it leans into the pain of navigating teenage love but confounds in others, and leaves you pondering what might have emerged had it trusted simplicity a little more.

HOPE MILL THEATRE 24th Feb – 1st March 2026

PRIVATE LIVES

Small Theatres

Written by Noel Coward

Directed by Amy Gavin

Hope Mill Theatre

HER Productions’ Private Lives at Hope Mill Theatre arrives fizzing with champagne wit and a sharpened feminist gaze, popping Noël Coward’s most famous divorce comedy like a well shaken cocktail. The result is brisk, intelligent and slyly subversive, a production that knows its Coward and is not afraid to raise an eyebrow at him.

Coward’s premise remains deliciously absurd. Divorced couple Elyot and Amanda, honeymooning with new spouses in the same hotel, discover that their shared history is as combustible as ever. Old sparks catch fire with hot temper and passion in equal measure. New marriages smoulder and combust. Doors slam, insults sparkle and love behaves badly…very badly indeed! Director Amy Gavin honours the play’s architecture while quietly rewiring its emotional circuitry. What once felt like a duel of egos becomes a study in mutual toxicity and mutual addiction, with both leads given equal agency and equal blame.

The performances crackle. Hannah Ellis Ryan’s Amanda is played with steel wrapped in silk, her wit deployed like a rapier but her vulnerability allowed to show in fleeting, telling pauses. Charlie Nobel as Elyot is all louche charm and boyish petulance, is less the romantic rake and more the emotional arsonist who cannot resist striking the match. Their chemistry is thrilling and alarming in equal measure, the kind that makes you laugh uncomfortably even as you recognise the warning signs of ensuing violence. Coward’s dialogue mainly lands cleanly, every barb sharpened, every epigram delivered with precision rather than reverence.

The supporting roles are more than polite foils. Victor and Sibyl, often reduced to comic casualties, are given texture and dignity here. Hope Yolande certainly has fun with her role and perhaps relies too much on comedic expressions but is suitably fiery when required. Jack Elliot who was so good in the recent Mojo at The Kings Arms plays another blinder with his portrayal of the hapless Victor. Their bafflement and hurt play as genuinely human responses to a situation that would be intolerable offstage. This grounding choice is key to the production’s bite. It stops the play floating away on its own cleverness and anchors it firmly in emotional consequence.

Direction is confident and pacey, letting Coward’s language breathe while refusing to let the play dawdle. The famous physical comedy in the Paris flat scene is staged with balletic control, violence and flirtation blurring in a way that feels deliberately uncomfortable. It is funny, yes, but it also asks the audience to sit with the uglier implications of romanticising chaos. The use of black and white film is a nice touch but risks being overused. As with their recent production of The Taming of The Shrew music is used to change pace and disarm as quicksilver moods shift from playful fun to violent extremes.

In Hope Mill’s intimate space, Private Lives feels immediate and faintly dangerous, like eavesdropping on a very glamorous argument next door. HER Productions deliver a revival that respects Coward’s wit while interrogating his politics, proving that this 1930s classic still has teeth. You leave laughing at the cruelty of fickle fate while wincing and quietly relieved that some passions are best admired from the safety of the stalls.

Hope Mill Theatre Jan 28th – 8th February. Dukes Theatre, Lancaster 24th- 28th February 2026

A Christmas Carol

Large Theatres

Adapted by Deborah McAndrew

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A warm, witty, and wonderfully human A Christmas Carol seasoned with some Yorkshire grit.

Leeds Playhouse once again unwraps its annual festive treat, and this year’s A Christmas Carol is a glowing, golden bauble of a production. Set in Victorian Yorkshire wool mill, it’s traditional enough to satisfy the purists, yet peppered with just enough invention to keep the tale feeling spry, spirited, and surprisingly fresh.

From the moment the ensemble spills onto the stage, singing carols with crisp winter harmonies, there’s an infectious sense of festive togetherness. The production leans into the story’s communal heart: figures materialise from the shadows to become narrators, townsfolk, ghosts, and even Scrooge’s own conscience, creating a fluid world where past, present and future overlap like swirling snowflakes.

At the centre of it all is Reece Dinsdale as a sharply etched, quietly devastating Ebenezer Scrooge. The performance is refreshingly understated; rather than a cartoon miser, we’re given a man worn down by choices, loss, and habit. This gives the eventual thawing of that famously icy heart real emotional heft and makes his giddy transition into festive joy all the more delightful.

The Ghosts are a particular triumph. Bea Clancy as The Past arrives with a gentle, moonlit glow, weaving memory and melancholy together with a dancer’s grace. Claudia Kariuki bursts in with boisterous charm, a living embodiment of abundance and goodwill, sweeping the audience into laughter with every generous gesture. Their performance is a real scene stealer and when surrounded by the human dancing baubles, this is a real highpoint in this production that evokes part big Hollywood musical, part grand burlesque production. And the wraithlike Ghost of Christmas Future is evoked with spare, elegant, and utterly silent drama that is visually haunting and remains chilling in its simplicity, a reminder that even the most festive tale has its shadows.

Claudia Kariuki as The Ghost of Christmas Present. Image credit: Helen Murray

The Cratchit family, The Fezziwigs and Scrooge’s nephew, Fred are all the embodiment of good nature and strength in adversity. Their scenes perfectly highlight everything that Scrooge has loss in his quest for financial success. The deaf actors in the Cratchit family are highly effective giving some beautiful moments such as Nadia Nadarajah giving a silent but deadly takedown of Scrooge while Stephen Collins brings a gentle warmth to every scene as Bob.

Visually, this production is a feast. The set design by Hayley Grindle conjures Victorian Leeds with warm lamplight, crisp silhouettes, and a set that expands and contracts like the folds of a storybook. Costumes shimmer with earthy, Dickensian texture, while clever lighting shifts the tone from cosy hearthside scenes to eerie graveyard gloom in an instant. Music plays a starring role with brass band music in the background and live accompaniment on stage threading through the piece, giving it the feel of a carol concert wrapped in theatrical magic.

If there’s the occasional moment where the pacing softens or a sentimental beat lingers a little too long, it’s easily forgiven in a production that so wholeheartedly embraces the season’s spirit. This isn’t a radical reinvention, nor does it try to be. Instead, it’s a lovingly crafted, community-minded Christmas retelling that understands exactly why audiences return to Dickens year after year. Director Amy Leach knows the Playhouse audience well from her tenure as Associate Artistic Director and as always is a deft hand at creating work that is incredibly inclusive which never veers into tokenism.

Warm, witty, and full of heart, Leeds Playhouse’s A Christmas Carol is a festive hug in theatrical form. A show that sends you back out into the night believing, just a little bit more, in kindness, generosity, and second chances.

LEEDS PLAYHOUSE 20th Nov ’25 – 17th Jan ’26