Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Underground Venues
Theatre
9 Jul 4:45pm to 5:30pm, 10 Jul 10:30pm to 11:15pm, 11 Jul 4:45pm to 5:30pm, 14 Jul 10:30pm to 11:15pm

Peaceful is a refreshingly uncomplicated play: a good, old-fashioned ghost story. In a lonely house, the ageing Miss Charles thinks she hears voices – much to the chagrin of her friend and servant, the mendacious Mr Coburn. Against Coburn’s advice, she summons a medium, who declares that her life will be “peaceful”. But as all three of the protagonists discover, when you open the door to the spirit world, you never know quite who will step through…

Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Underground Venues
Theatre
8-9 Jul 6pm to 6:50pm, 14 Jul 2pm to 2:50pm, 15 Jul 6pm to 6:50pm

“What have I let myself in for?” reads the heartfelt question I scribbled shortly after the lights went down, right at the top of my reporter’s notebook.  What I’d let myself in for was a play about swinging – complete with vampish mini-skirts, pink fluffy handcuffs, and an outbreak of comedy cross-dressing.  As the old line goes, though, it’s all done in the best possible taste; so the surprisingly-mature audience around me giggled naughtily at the innuendo.

Reviewed by Richard Stamp
The Old Clubhouse
Theatre
Run ended

A new collaboration between singer Patricia Hartshorne and pianist Peter Dobson, musical cabaret show Dark Deeds does indeed go to some pretty dark places. There’s humorous gore – I spent most of the show trying to ignore a disembodied hand sitting on my table – but there’s real horror too, particularly when the duo turn to some chilling episodes from the history of the twentieth century. It all adds up to a show that’s disturbing and perplexing, but oddly thrilling as well.

Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Underground Venues
Theatre
4 & 7 Jul 1:30pm to 4:30pm, 8-9 Jul 6:30pm to 8:30pm, 11 & 14 Jul 1:30pm to 4:30pm, 15-16 Jul 6:30pm to 8:30pm, 18 Jul 1:30pm to 4:30pm. These times are 'windows' - the show lasts 10 minutes.

Dog Rough isn’t a conventional piece of theatre.  For one thing, you listen to the whole thing through a huge pair of headphones; and for another, you’ll be sent out of Underground Venues to enjoy it in the open air.  As well as the super-sized earpieces, you’ll get to wear a jacket – “men traditionally choose the leather one”, the box office informed me – and if you rummage round in its capacious pockets, you’ll find you’re carrying a handful of props with relevance to the voices you’re hearing in your ear.

Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Arts Centre Studio
Theatre
8 Jul 9:30pm to 10:45pm, 9-10 Jul 8pm to 9:15pm

It truly pains me to have to say this, but French musical Tomorrow’s Dawn was doomed from the very start – from the moment they decided to sing it in English.  It’s sadly clear that most of the cast don’t speak the language with fluency, a fact which presents them an insurmountable artistic challenge.  And so, their story of youthful love and family drama becomes lost… buried by the weight of garbled syntax, and bamboozlingly mispronounced words.

Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Underground Venues
Comedy
5 Jul 10:30pm to 11:15pm, 6 Jul 8:45pm to 9:30pm, 7-8 Jul 10:30pm to 11:15pm

The year’s 1851 and we’re assembled at the Great Exhibition in London, where a miracle of Victorian engineering waits to be unveiled.  It looks impressive, but what does it do?  Nobody quite knows.  That’s the jumping-off point for Scrap The Script’s semi-improvised show, which invites the audience to insert key plot details into a tale of academic rivalry, familial blood-letting and trans-national love.

Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Arts Centre Studio
Theatre
6 & 9 Jul 10pm to 11:15pm, 11-12 Jul 7:45pm to 9pm

Stickleback Theatre’s Jordan is a horrible, horrible play.  Not a bad play, you understand, but a relentlessly disturbing one – the kind of work you flinch from, which shows you things you simply didn’t want to know.  First performed back in 1992, it’s essentially a biography of real-life Morecambe woman Shirley Jones, who has the misfortune to fall for the wrong kind of boyfriend and ultimately loses even her treasured child.

Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Underground Venues
Comedy
Run ended

A head-on collision between magic and science is a spectacle I’d pay good money to see.  Oliver Meech’s show doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its title – it’s more a case of magic and science apologetically bumping into each other – but he still delivers an amusing hour of deception, with a few moments of true wonderment thrown in along the way.