British Theatre Guide podcast

2018 marks the second time Evolution Productions has produced Cinderella at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury after the venue re-opened in 2011. Simon Sladen speaks to the theatre's resident Dame Ben Roddy and Marlowe regulars Lloyd Hollett and Phil Gallagher as they star in their fourth panto together. Simon, Ben, Lloyd and Phil discuss this year's show, their approach to playing the Ugly Sisters a...

Derby Theatre's Christmas show for 2018 is Mike Kenny's adaptation of Hansel and Gretel from the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. BTG Midlands Editor Steve Orme talks about the show to Derby Theatre Artistic Director Sarah Brigham, who is directing the production, and actors Craig Anderson and Yana Penrose, who play the title roles of Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel runs at Derby Theatr...

BTG panto editor Simon Sladen speaks to pantomime company Imagine Theatre 's Managing Director Steve Boden and Robert Marsden, director of the Victoria Theatre, Halifax's pantomime and associate professor at Staffordshire University. 2018 will see Imagine Theatre present 14 pantomimes in venues across the United Kingdom having grown from 8 productions in 2009. In this episode, Steve and Robert dis...

The first in-house production in HOME Manchester's autumn and winter season for 2018 is a new production of French writer Jean Genet's 1947 play The Maids , in an English version by Martin Crimp. The play will be directed in-the-round at HOME by Lily Sykes, an English-born director who has lived and worked in Germany for the last ten years and has recently become a German citizen. In a break durin...

Red Ladder , which bills itself as "Britain's leading radical theatre company", this year celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, tracing its roots back to the left-wing agitprop theatre of the 1960s. To celebrate, instead of its usual fare of new political writing, it has turned to Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children , which artistic director Rod Dixon has staged as a promenade production in a...

Mark Smith talks to Conrad Nelson and Deborah McAndrew about their brand new version of Dario Fo's classic They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay! (also known as Can't Pay? Won't Pay! ). The show is a co-production between York Theatre Royal and Halifax-based company Northern Broadsides , where Conrad Nelson is the Artistic Director. They discuss the company's past and future, the process of adapting and tr...

The latest production from acclaimed theatre company RashDash , Future Bodies , has been produced in collaboration with Unlimited Theatre and HOME Manchester as a trailblazer event for the 2018 Manchester Science Festival. What does it mean to have and to be a body? As we increasingly fuse our biological brains with technology, at what point do we stop being human? Does it even matter? During rehe...

Ian Rankin's Edinburgh detective Inspector Rebus, the star of many of his novels and short stories, is about to make his first ever stage appearance in a brand new story from Rankin with playwright Rona Munro. BTG Midlands Editor Steve Orme spoke about the production to Ian by phone from his home in Edinburgh, then in person to actors Charles Lawson (Jim McDonald in Coronation Street ) and John St...

Where We Began is a new piece of theatre devised by a multicultural cast and instigated by Stand and Be Counted Theatre . This company works extensively with asylum seekers, migrants and others seeking sanctuary. Here, BTG reviewer Mark Smith speaks to writer/performer Rosie MacPherson, one of the Artistic Directors of Stand and Be Counted, and Tafadzwa Muchenje, one of the devisers and performers...

For its first production of the autumn 2018 season, HOME in Manchester has again teamed up with Lyric Hammersmith for a pairing of two of Shakespeare's plays, Othello and Macbeth , assembled into one production by director Jude Christian to highlight, in particular, the stories of the female characters in both plays. A week before the production's Manchester opening, Jude spoke to BTG editor David...

The Fun Palace was an idea conceived originally by influential theatre maker Joan Littlewood with architect Cedric Price in the early 1960s. Their building-based idea was never built, but writer and actor Stella Duffy OBE came up with the idea to resurrect it in a different way for Littlewood's centenary in 2014. This has become a fast-growing annual event co-directed by Stella with Sarah-Jane Raw...

In our first podcast episode on the 2018 Edinburgh Festivals, we speak to two people who are now veteran Fringe producers and performers. Rick Conte will return to the Fringe this year as Dog in the multi-award-winning Puppet State Theatre production The Man Who Planted Trees . However he is also performing and producing a new adaptation of The Time Machine by H G Wells that combines puppetry with...

The Theatre Royal in Nottingham is preparing for its annual Classic Thrillers Season featuring four different plays over four weeks: Peter Gordon's Sleighed to Death , A Touch of Danger by Francis Durbridge, a new adaptation of Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel by Louise Page and John Goodrum's adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Nightmare Room . In this episode, BTG Midlands editor Steve...

Philip Fisher talks to John Hopkins and Tuppence Middleton about the differences between working on stage and screen and most particularly their upcoming engagement in Vicky Jones's award-winning The One at Soho Theatre.

As it prepares to leave its building in the hands of developers for refurbishment, Bolton's Octagon Theatre takes its audiences on the road, literally, for its seasonal musical Summer Holiday , based on the Cliff Richard film. The performance begins at the new Bolton Interchange bus station where the audience will meet before travelling by bus with the actors to the theatre, where the rest of the...

Filament Theatre's latest production is Rufus Longbottom and the Space Rabbit , which was created after the production team collaborated with more than 600 schoolchildren on ideas for characters for the new show. At the start of the show's UK tour in Derby, BTG's Midlands editor Steve Orme spoke to Filament co-founder Osnat Schmool, who co-created the project and wrote the music and lyrics, and pe...

BTG's Philip Fisher talks to Amanda Mehtala from Theatre in Paris , a venture designed to open up the Parisian theatre scene to English speakers by providing English surtitles for French productions in major Paris theatres.

The Tiger Lillies is an Olivier Award-winning and Grammy-nominated musical trio with more than thirty years of success around the world as a live band, as recording artists and as part of several theatre productions, including the Olivier Award-winning Shockheaded Peter on the West End. Their latest collaboration is with visual director Mark Holthusen and writer Peder Bjurman on a story set along...

Director Jake Murray, who was co-artistic director for Manchester's Royal Exchange Studio space with current Exchange Artistic Director Sarah Frankcom until he left Manchester in 2008, is back in the city with his new Durham-based Elysium Theatre Company. His latest production is of Stephen Adly Guirgis's Pullitzer Prize-winning play Jesus Hopped The 'A' Train , which has only been produced twice...

Legacy is a new play written by Paul Birch for the York Theatre Royal as an intergenerational collaboration: its cast is made up of Youth Theatre members as well as actors aged 65-plus from the local community. Exploring themes of corruption and the uses—and misuses—of individuals' online identities, the play uses a sci-fi thriller lens to examine some extremely timely questions. Mark Smith talks...

James Brining has been Artistic Director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse since 2012. Prior to that, he spent sixteen years in Scotland as Artistic Director of TAG Theatre and then Dundee Rep. He talks here to Mark Smith about his forthcoming production of Sunshine on Leith , a musical based on the songs of The Proclaimers, which he originated with writer Stephen Greenhorn at Dundee Rep in 2007. In...

On 20 February 2018, regional theatre director, artistic director and chief executive John Blackmore died at the age of 77. He was chief executive at Bolton's Octagon Theatre for 12 years, but he also put together a plan to save Liverpool's Everyman and Playhouse theatres, was Artistic Director of Manchester's Library Theatre in the 1960s, founded the company that became Northern Stage in Newcastl...

Pullitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation is being revived by director Bijan Sheibani for HOME Manchester in March 2018. Set in a creative drama class in a community centre in Vermont, the cast comprises Amelia Bullmore as Marty, Anthony Ofoegbu as James, Sian Clifford as Theresa, Con O'Neill as Schultz and Yasmin Paige as Lauren. Just over a week before the pro...

Midlands editor Steve Orme speaks to actors Sean McKenzie and Jo Mousley about performing Jim Cartwright's popular two-hander Two at Derby Theatre. The play, which premièred at the Octagon Theatre in Bolton in 1989, focuses on a single evening in a Northern pub, with the same two actors playing the feuding landlord and landlady as well as an array of customers who visit their establishment. Two wi...

Mark Smith talks to Esther Richardson, Bryony Lavery and Hannah Peel in a busy York Theatre Royal café about Pilot Theatre 's new adaptation of Brighton Rock . They discuss the appeal of Brighton Rock's morally complex underworld, getting younger people into regional theatres, creating a musical and choreographic world for the play, and how the company set out to look at Graham Greene's classic st...