Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ is a staple of GCSE and A-Level English; it’s a better bet than ‘The Knight’s Tale’, slightly cleaner than ‘The Wife of Bath’, and has a good strong narrative at its centre. This show is aimed at a school audience, with all the workshop potential (and income – let’s not forget […]

The length of the space is full of dark brown earth. There are little illuminated cities and towns across the landscape. Stage left stands a pilot. ‘We know he is a pilot because of his uniform’ is a repeated refrain in this story of eruptions and explosions, environmental and emotional. From the muddy mounds emerge […]

Directed by Neil Bartlett and staged amid the sombre shadows and silhouettes of Paule Constable’s lighting design, Britten: The Canticles is an intense evening of music visually animated by physical theatre, dance and film. The piece has been devised in collaboration with leading choreographers Scott Graham and Wendy Houstoun, as well as controversial war artist John Keane, […]

In the first of three dance pieces by the Californian dance company Zion the audience is invited to cluster around a small raised stage. As mine was an English audience of course there was much embarrassed shuffling ‘not too close’, and the stage manager handling this aspect of our entry had to coax and encourage. […]

Table Manners dished up three courses ‘exploring the rituals of food and dining that enshrine our social hierarchies and hang-ups’. First comes the buffet, Delia – We’ve Been Thinking, presented in lavish colour by Hunt & Darton. Seating is placed around the fully laden and largely inaccessible buffet display. We are given name tags so that […]