Education Education Education at The Lowry

Reviewed by Jane Turner March 2018

Tony Blair is remembered for many things and blamed for everything from Iraq to the destruction of Old Labour. Educationalists remember him for his apparent focus on education embodied in his proclamation that Labour’s top priority ‘was, is and always will be education, education, education’, and this mantra is at the heart of this fast paced and entertaining comedy.

Feverishly performed by the Wardrobe Ensemble in the top-notch setting of the Lowry’s Quay Theatre, this is set in the anarchic Wordsworth comprehensive school on the day after the 1997 Labour landslide. The election result proclaimed that things would ‘only get better’, and the play asks questions about what we are taught and who is to blame for the current state of the education system. It is a reminder of how the Blair government, despite over a decade of major investment, failed to deliver on its promise of an education utopia.

Holy Doom by Demob Happy

Reviewed by Andrew Marsden March 2018

Brighton based (but Newcastle formed) band Demob Happy’s second album, Holy Doom, is their first album as a three-piece, following the departure of lead guitarist Matthew Renforth in 2016. Although the band may have reduced in number, they most certainly have not reduced the impact of their scuzzy-grunge-psych rock.

Miss Saigon at Palace Theatre

Producer – Sir Cameron Mackintosh

Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyricist Alain Boublil

Reviewed by Katie Leicester March 2018

Miss Saigon is my absolute favourite musical so writing this review is probably the hardest but the most exciting opportunity so far as a critic. I first saw the production at The Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in 1989, intrigued and enchanted by Cameron Mackintosh’s works I naively watched Miss Saigon with the cast of Lea Salonga as Kim, Simon Bowman as Chris and Jonathan Price as the Engineer not realising then that this musical would capture my heart for ever more.

Fat Friends

at Opera House, Manchester

Reviewed by Matthew Dougall March 2018

This is writer / director Kay Mellor's foray into Musical Theatre after her hit comedy TV series of the same name. The show opens with lycra and spandex clad overweight bodies bumping and gyrating at a Zumba class at the local church. The year is the present, not a flashback to the 80s, and so this is an instant fail, and sadly the show never recovers.

East is East at Octagon Theatre, Bolton

Directed by Ben Occhipinti

Reviewed by Johanna Hassouna-Smith, March 2018

Ayub Khan Din's play, East is East, is a comedy about an Anglo-Pakistani family living in Salford in the 1970s. Produced in the mid-1990s, the play was one of the first mainstream theatre productions to deal with Asian culture. The 1999 film adaptation garnered critical acclaim and became one of the most successful British films of all time.

The Dinner Party

by Neil Simon

at Altrincham Little Theatre

Reviewed by John Waterhouse March 2018

The Dinner Party is a genuinely intriguing play partly because the premise is a very imaginative twist on an old stalwart. A standard Agatha Christie device (a la ‘The Mousetrap’ and ‘Ten Little Indians’) finds a random group of essentially middle class individuals all invited to a party by an unseen host and old dirty secrets are gradually unfolded. Interestingly, the playwright Neil Simon farced this idea in his screenplay for the film ‘Murder by Death’.

With The Dinner Party there is no murder mystery; no under-cover murderer or detective masquerades as a guest and no crime has been committed. This does not mean however that the secrets to be unfolded are not of an excruciating nature and that some surprising interpersonal relationships are revealed, making this a complex play which leaves the audience thinking.

Whisky Galore at Oldham Coliseum

Written by Philip Goulding, adapted from the Compton Mackenzie novel

Reviewed by John Waterhouse March 2018

At first glance, a curious if not bizaarre combination - a very-dated 1949 Ealing Comedy featuring largely male characters, based loosely on a real World War event, but played by an exclusively female cast.

John Bramwell

at St Helens – Citadel

Reviewed by Jane Turner March 2018

Northerners get more than their fair share of bad press, with some think tanks writing off whole cities and Boris Johnson casually besmirching one city in a single sentence. This is usually done by those who never set foot much further north than Watford and who think we all live in an industrial and cultural wasteland, eat pies, vote Brexit and keep coal in the bath.

St. Helens, where 58% voted to leave the EU is on the face of it a typical working class northern town, and on a night when the local rugby league team ‘the Saints’ were at home, the pubs and streets were full of men, sporting their team colours and excitedly discussing their team prospects (it ended badly with a defeat by Leeds).

The Importance of Being Ernest

Directed by Alastair Whatley at Opera House

Reviewed by Johanna Hassouna-Smith, March 2018

The Importance of Being Ernest is a comedy by Oscar Wilde and takes a satirical look at the lives of two men who lead double lives in order to escape their responsibilities. The men, Jack Worthing and Algernon seek better lives for themselves and the story raises the questions; how important is it to you to be who you are? And would you change yourself to lead a more adventurous or less complicated life?