The Ice Cream Van’s Hunger thrilled from the very beginning. The curtains open to a monster mash of performers piled high, and tangled up to resemble Alex Scheffler’s illustration of the Horrible Beast in Julia Donaldson’s Room on the Broom. Hunger’s four-headed beast turn round slowly and spectacularly to reveal a bloody mass of fabulously […]

David Hoyle is an experience to be had at least once in a lifetime: an avant-garde cabaret artiste from Blackpool with a sonorous voice and a virtuoso ability at audience interaction. The pre-show pop music is mixed with a narrative discoursing like a political manifesto, and its combination of frivolity and vitriol sets the tone […]

This physical/musical theatre piece tells the story of the circus sideshow character of the title, and on this occasion was set in the highly appropriate Bosco tent in the Spiegel Gardens (the Bosco is a wooden tent with steeply raked seating, and inside feels very much like a big top). It is performed in a […]

Wooden, road, pale, stone and woollen were some of Ivor Cutler’s favourite words. I expected honey, or bee perhaps. But nothing was ever as you’d expect it with Ivor Cutler, which this clever and exuberant production makes clear. The dour mystique of the cult Scottish writer and musician is vividly channelled in a splendid performance […]

Sporting an asymmetric blond coiffure and dressed in frock-coat and waistcoat complete with fob watch, the baby-faced Luke Wright takes to the stage as himself, the New Romantic dandy of the title. Despite this appearance, he is no self-centred aesthete, but a virtuoso wordsmith with a sincere and sensitive social conscience. I had not previously […]