A Small Mind At The Theatre

I was very much looking forward to seeing the new Made In Northampton version of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts , as I had heard on the grapevine nice things about the early previews. Maybe my hopes had been raised too much? Widow Helen Alving is about to dedicate an orphanage she has built in the memory of her late husband, Captain Alving. However, with her son Oswald home after her having banished him away from the family home for his own good, and Pastor Manders visiting on a rare occasion, hidden stories of the past, ghosts, come to bear changing life in the Alving house forever. Ibsen was very much a forward and often controversial thinker with his plays, and here is no different, this is challenging and controversial material for the time, and indeed even now the morals held within have great bearing. It's clearly a brilliant play, however, there are too many issues with this production to make it a perfect version. The opening scene is a tough one to get into, a confron...

I have to confess that I am a huge fan of the little mysteries of Agatha Christie, however, I also confess that I have read very few of the novels. My love comes from the various screen versions, growing up through the eighties, there was always the comfort of a good old fun little murder going on, that Joan Hickson, aka Miss Marple (random fact, Hickson played the cottage maid in the original 1937 film version of this play) or David Suchet, aka Hercule Poirot, would breeze into the middle of, and by the end of the hour or so, have cornered the guilty party in front of an assortment of all very potential suspects. They are frivolous in theory, but pull them apart (as fellow reviewing blogger The Real Chrisparkle is want to do in his Agatha Christie Challenge) and you realise that you the reader/viewer are observing a cleverly created spiders web of intrigue, where on closer inspection, all the threads lead to the big, bad, murderous spider at its centre. Love from a Stranger a...

THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR THE PUBLIC REVIEWS First performed in 1955, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and prestigious winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is widely regarded as Tennessee Williams’ finest play. Indeed by many one of the best of the twentieth century. Telling the story of the strife of a Mississippi family including husband Brick (Charles Aitken) and  his wife Maggie (Mariah Gale). Set during a party (in a bedroom!) to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th   birthday, family riffs, sickness and hidden desires bring the dynasty to a head on one alcohol fuelled evening where all emotions are laid bare. The play clearly fails to try to win its audience over with the first fifteen minutes or so, as introduced to the characters of Brick and Maggie in their stifling (not just for them) bedroom we are treated to, what is in effect a one person conversation. The maudlin Maggie rarely provides any humour during her one way conversation with her unloving husba...