19 stories by "Alice Weleminsky-Smith"
Connections is the National Theatre's festival of new plays for young people. This is the festival's twentieth year, and the 2015 programme saw 10 new plays debuted over six nights, with …
Hay Fever is over 90 years old and, unfortunately, it shows. Coward's comedy of errors about a dysfunctional family's disastrous attempt to entertain guests was not even that popular when it…
Alex Horne: Monsieur Butterfly is a very unusual comedy show. Whilst stand-up comedy could usually be described as 'someone standing still telling jokes for an hour, and maybe swinging th…
Sam Holcroft's new play posits that everyone has coping strategies or 'rules' by which they live their life. In Rules for Living, we watch a family try to get through what becomes a more and…
Whilst the content of Jonathan Tolins's play Buyer and Cellar is entirely fictional, it is based on a completely wacky truth: acting and singing phenomenon Barbra Streisand has built a stree…
All The Things You Said You Never Said Before You Thought You Could Ever Say explores the struggles of one couple through four actors. Switching fluidly between different pairings through…
Juxtaposing the upbeat, optimistic songs of the 1910s with the horrible truths of life at the Front, Oh What A Lovely War caused much more than a stir when it was first produced by Joan Litt…
Molly Wobbly tells the tale of the residents of Mammary Lane in the town of Little Happening. It's not a subtle show, and you can grab a pretty good sense of the plot from the place names al…
For the first few scenes of Spamalot, I had the same reservations that many of the Monty Python members had when the show debuted in 2004. Why would I want to pay to watch non-Monty Python a…
When a show starts with the audience being given pink or blue hairnets depending on their gender, and various male audience members being asked to chug a beer, wank over a dirty mag and then…
April in Paris is a two-hander which revolves around the lives of Al and Bet, a northern couple who are struggling with the strains of unemployment, boredom, and each other. When she is not …
Julian Mitchell's inspiration for his 1981 play Another Country came from the exposure in 1979 of rich, public school educated, and even knighted, Sir Anthony Blunt as having been a Soviet s…
Armstrong's War features just two characters " a young Canadian soldier who is recovering in hospital after a stint in Afghanistan, and a 12-year-old girl guide who comes to read to him so t…
(4/5 stars) After stand-up comedy, improvisation is probably the most prevalent form at the Edinburgh Fringe. It seems to be everywhere, and as all improv is really pretty much the same it's…
(4/5 Stars) How far would you go to help a friend? That's the question put to the characters in the musical Blood Ties who go to throw their friend a hen party, and end up having to help her…
(4/5 Stars) Nihal Armstrong is the son of Rahila Gupta, who wrote the script for this one woman show Don't Wake Me. Part poetry, part monologue, the story tells of the life of Nihal Armstron…
How do you create a hit play? Take your last successful piece of writing, change a few details and make it into something new! Anyone who has not yet seen Lee Hall's brilliant play The Pitme…
No matter what the production, I always find a trip to the Orange Tree Theatre a treat, as its intimate in-the-round setting brings you so close to the action that it is almost like watching…
Coram Boy is, at its core,an intensely brutal piece. Although it is adapted from a children's novel, it isn't light-hearted: scenes of murdered babies, child abuse and a teenager givi…
