Receiving theatres
HOME
HOME became a location for the Manchester International Festival this year with The Faggots and their Friends and All right. Good night., both of which challenged the audience in different ways, but in both cases in how long a play can run without an interval. I struggled to like the first of these, but the second, though it required a lot of concentration over two hours, was quite fascinating in its own way.
But my highlights of all the productions making a HOME visit this year were Ad Infinitum’s If You Fall, which especially resonated with those of us with experience of the care system for older relatives, and a compelling translation of Shakespeare to London in the twentieth century from actor Tracy-Ann Oberman and director Brigid Larmour in The Merchant of Venice 1936, which can still be seen in Stratford until February before transferring to the Criterion Theatre in London.
The Lowry
I saw my first panto of the year at The Lowry back in April when Mother Goose finally made it to Salford on the penultimate stop of its tour. This was, as I said in my review, largely the Ian McKellen and John Bishop show, but there were some excellent performers around them when they were given the chance to show their skills and, with leading physical comedy director Cal McCrystal at the helm, I described it as “a great night of just pure joyous (occasionally suggestively filthy) fun.”
The Crown Jewels was another show where some great comedy performers who know how to work an audience were cut loose to do their thing, although Simon Nye’s script could have done with a lot of tightening up to keep up some momentum—and story.
However, while I would watch Kathryn Hunter in pretty much anything, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, directed by Simon McBurney for Complicité in very much that company’s style from the novel by Olga Tokarczuk, was pretty compelling for its entire three-hour running time with minute attention to detail.
Palace
I only visited the Palace Theatre a couple of times in 2023, the first for a musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that was, disappointingly, rather static and flat. The last, however, was for Hamilton, which lived up to all the hype; it continues in Manchester until February 2024 before visiting Bristol and Birmingham.