Kris Hallett- life as theatre

Philosophy of the World at the BOVTS Weston Studio doesn’t feel staged so much as detonated in front of you. A Fringe First-winning show from In Bed With My Brother, devised and performed by Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory, it takes the mythology of The Shaggs, those outsider musicians canonised and ridiculed in equal measure, and turns it into a live act of theatrical self-harm. The Shaggs, whose film rights are somehow held by Tom Cruise, hang over the piece like patron saints of beautiful failure, of art made so sincerely and so far outside accepted language that the world couldn’t decide whether to laugh at it or worship it. That tension runs through the whole show like an exposed wire. This is a piece about making art when nobody wants you to. About dragging something ugly and honest out of yourself and placing it under hot stage lights anyway. About bleeding into the carpet and calling it music and then standing there while people decide whether you’re a genius or a joke.

The whole production pulses with the spirit of Antonin Artaud and the brutal swagger of In-Yer-Face Theatre, theatre not as narrative but as confrontation, sensation, impact trauma. Artaud wanted theatre that attacked the audience like plague, something sensory and uncontrollable that bypassed rational thought and crawled straight into the nervous system, and this feels less like watching a play than being trapped inside a collapsing drum kit while somebody screams poetry through the cracks in the metal.

The first act is almost entirely wordless, or at least language feels too flimsy a word for what is happening. Sentences arrive in shards and fragments, fired into the back wall before they can fully settle into meaning, while Alexander, Lynn and Cory move like they’ve replaced blood with electricity, their bodies twitching and colliding with the frightening precision of people running on adrenaline, exhaustion and instinct alone. Every gesture looks sharpened to a point. Dana Chmielewska’s movement work pushes the performers right to the edge of collapse, the body becoming both instrument and battleground. You stop searching for plot after a while because the show has no interest in guiding you safely through itself and instead you start watching for rupture, for the moment the whole thing might split open.y

And it feels dangerous, genuinely dangerous, in a way that most theatre never manages anymore. Not because one shocking thing happens, but because the room itself becomes unstable. Audience-thrown Coke cans arc through the air like tiny acts of civil unrest, their sticky remains sweating into the floorboards long after impact. Drums are rolled on with the threat and force of industrial machinery. The performers push themselves through brutal repetition until their bodies seem on the verge of becoming unusable. Nudity appears not as provocation but reclamation, flesh stripped of ownership and handed back to itself. The danger comes from uncertainty more than anything else, from the sense that the show could veer anywhere at any moment and that nobody, performers included, is fully in control of where it lands, though somehow that loss of control also feels meticulously designed. Neil Haigh, appearing as both stage manager and looming patriarchal force, becomes the perfect counterweight to the chaos around him, absorbing and redirecting the show’s violence with grim comic precision.

The second act feels like the nervous breakdown after the standing ovation. The piece starts consuming itself. The Shaggs stop existing as people and become something larger and stranger, symbols for what it means to create outside legitimacy, to make art badly and honestly and obsessively enough that eventually the world mistakes your sincerity for genius, or maybe the other way around. Scenes skid into one another like cars losing traction on black ice. The rhythms fracture and reform. It constantly threatens collapse while somehow remaining terrifyingly disciplined underneath, like watching somebody juggle knives while half asleep and becoming more precise because of it.

Then the third act tears the whole thing open. Three separate theatrical languages run beside one another like exposed wiring: a stream-of-consciousness monologue spiralling endlessly outward, a mind map trying desperately to pin order onto chaos, and drums being systematically destroyed in front of us. It lands like ritual sacrifice. By this point the production has tightened itself into a wire pulled impossibly taut, and when it finally snaps the release feels enormous, ugly, euphoric. Beneath all the apparent disorder sits an extraordinary level of control, from Lily Woodford-Lewis’s harsh industrial lighting to the overwhelming percussion-heavy soundscape from Brain Rays & Quiet, all conspiring to make the space feel simultaneously theatrical and apocalyptic.  

Someone once described In Bed With My Brother as either genius or shit. Philosophy of the World answers that question with a grin, a smashed cymbal and blood on its knuckles.

This is theatre with its fingernails ripped off. Live, visceral, sweating through its clothes. Smart enough to know exactly what it’s doing and feral enough to make you doubt it anyway. The kind of performance that can only exist in a room full of bodies sharing the same air and the same uncertainty. A beautiful car crash I didn’t want to crawl out of.

Kiss of the Spider Woman has long occupied a curious place in the musical theatre landscape, a show spoken of far more often than it is encountered. Since its Broadway premiere in 1992, it has lingered at the margins of the canon, half‑remembered, half‑mythologised. Which makes its appearance at Bristol Old Vic feel not so much like a revival as an emergence, something long submerged breaking the surface again.

What immediately becomes apparent is just how singular this musical remains.

Set within an Argentinian prison under a fascist regime, the framework is stark, two men sharing a cell, one a Marxist revolutionary, the other imprisoned for “corrupting public morals.” But the show refuses to stay locked inside that realism. Instead, it fractures. It drifts. From the darkness of the cell, a second world is conjured, one built from old Hollywood romances, Technicolor melodrama and cinematic glamour, and gradually, insistently, that world begins to seep into the first.

Molina’s stories are not merely distractions. They are shelter, sustenance, and resistance. Fantasy becomes a way of staying alive, performance a kind of armour. As brutality presses in, illusion does not retreat, it pushes back. The result is a musical that exists in an unstable space between escape and confrontation, where beauty and danger press uncomfortably close.

Inevitably, there are echoes of Cabaret, another musical where fascism advances quietly while performance dazzles defiantly at the centre. There are hints, too, of Chicago, in the way spectacle refracts reality rather than simply embellishing it. But Kiss of the Spider Woman is a looser, stranger beast. Less polished. More intimate. And less interested in resolving its contradictions into anything easily digestible.

That ambivalence extends to John Kander and Fred Ebb’s score. At its best, it mirrors the show’s internal tensions, swinging between lush pastiche and stark minimalism. Songs such as “Dressing Them Up” and “She’s a Woman” luxuriate in pastiche, indulging Molina’s cinematic fantasies with knowing theatrical flair, while Valentin’s material is stripped back, rhythmically tighter, more abrasive. Not every musical moment lands cleanly, however. There are passages where the score circles its emotional beats rather than advancing them, creating a deliberate languor that sometimes risks stalling narrative momentum. It is a score more interested in atmosphere and idea than propulsion, a choice that feels intentional, even when it frustrates.

Director Paul Foster leans into that unsettled quality rather than smoothing it away. This is a production that understands its own artifice and uses it purposefully. Howard Hudson’s lighting becomes a hinge between worlds, draining the prison scenes of colour into oppressive greys before flooding Aurora’s appearances with saturated, intoxicating hues. Andrzej Goulding’s projections creep in quietly, layers of smoke, shadow and half‑formed imagery gradually tightening their grip, until the spider’s web unfurls across the back wall, slow and inevitable.

The visual storytelling is precise without ever feeling gratuitous. Every element serves the same creeping idea, that fantasy, once invited in, cannot be neatly contained. At times, the design’s richness threatens to crowd moments that might benefit from greater stillness, privileging mood over emotional sharpness.

There is also a deliberate tension in tone. Camp flickers throughout the evening, even in its most grounded moments, occasionally creating a sense of distance that prevents the prison’s threat from fully landing. At times, this softens the oppressive weight of the regime hovering just out of sight. Yet the tonal unease also feels intrinsic to the piece. This is a musical about performance, about the masks people construct to survive. To lean into theatricality here is not to evade the material, but to articulate its core contradiction.

At the heart of the production are three performances that bring its shifting worlds into focus.

Anna‑Jane Casey’s Aurora is a figure of pure construction, star power held together by control and precision. She moves like the memory of a classic Hollywood heroine, Gabriella Slade’s colour‑coded costumes allowing her to slip between identities, genres and moods. Vocally, Casey handles Kander and Ebb’s pastiche with authority, delivering polish where the score demands glamour. In the title number, clad in black, Aurora sharpens into something more unsettling, a fantasy that no longer simply comforts, but commands.

George Blagden’s Valentin is tightly wound and quietly ferocious, his physical restraint carrying as much weight as his vocals. He brings solidity to a role that can easily harden into ideology, grounding its politics in exhaustion and suppressed rage. Opposite him, Fabian Soto Pacheco, stepping in for Layton Williams (now giving it iceberg on Broadway), gives a beautifully judged performance as Molina. There is an openness to his work that never tips into caricature, and a genuine love of cinematic fantasia woven through every gesture. His vocal choices favour emotional clarity over showy flourish, anchoring the production even at its most heightened. It feels like a genuine early‑career breakthrough.

For all its visual richness, Kiss of the Spider Woman does not overwhelm. It insinuates. It works patiently, layering image, sound and idea, until its emotional reach becomes undeniable, like that web slowly tightening its hold.

And it lingers. Not through grand, show‑stopping highs, but through quieter unease, the blurring of fantasy and reality, the recognition of performance as both refuge and threat. This is not an easy musical to love on first encounter. Its pleasures are complicated, its imperfections integral to its texture. But this production makes a persuasive case for why Kiss of the Spider Woman deserves to be revisited, grappled with, and seen far more often.

Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x) arrives at a moment when the Edinburgh solo show rarely exists as a closed system. Increasingly, these works are built with a second life in view, shaped not only for the festival circuit but for eventual migration to television. In a post Fleabag, post Baby Reindeer landscape, the journey from one‑person show to screen adaptation has become a familiar pathway rather than an anomaly. This is the ecosystem into which Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x) steps, knowingly and with confidence, even as it remains rooted in the immediacy of live performance.

Written and performed by Jade Franks, the show understands the appeal of that model. It offers humour, a compelling central presence and a premise that can be grasped instantly. A working‑class Liverpudlian navigating the social codes of Cambridge University is a clean, high‑contrast idea, and Franks wastes little time putting it to work. The movement from a Liverpool call centre to the rituals and habits of an elite institution is sketched briskly, with attention fixed on friction rather than sentimentality. The material is personal, but never sealed off from the audience. It communicates clearly and without strain.

Crucially, it works as theatre on its own terms. Franks is a confident, engaging performer with sharp comic timing and a clear command of structure. She holds the room easily, moving between direct address and character with precision rather than flourish. When she slips into the voices and behaviours of fellow students, tutors or authority figures, the sketches are economical and exact, offering just enough detail to trigger recognition without tipping into caricature. The performance has momentum, carrying the audience through a series of encounters that gradually build a picture of social navigation under pressure.

The writing mirrors this accumulation. Rather than driving towards confrontation or catharsis, scenes stack, and patterns slowly come into focus. Class reveals itself through accent and vocabulary, through assumptions about money, through the quiet incredulity that someone might need to work alongside their studies. It appears in the casual question about school background that doubles as a sorting mechanism. Once Cambridge becomes the dominant frame, the observations sharpen. Exclusion rarely announces itself. It surfaces in moments such as being subtly wrong‑footed at formal dinners, or realising that certain rules seem to apply only if you lack the finances to sidestep them. These specific, grounded details give the show its weight.

Direction by Tatenda Shamiso keeps the work clean and propulsive. The staging is sparse but purposeful, giving Franks full control of the space while maintaining forward motion. Scenes often flow into one another without heavy punctuation, reinforcing the sense of constant adjustment rather than dramatic rupture. Claudia Casino’s design supports this restraint. Costume and props are used sparingly as social cues rather than decoration, underlining the idea that class is read instantly, and often inaccurately, from surface signals.

In the context of a theatre culture increasingly alert to adaptation, it is tempting to think about what lingers beyond the room. Shows that travel especially far often consolidate their ideas into a single, emblematic image or figure. In Fleabag, it was the hamster, absurd and unsettling in equal measure. In Baby Reindeer, it was not just Martha’s presence but the cumulative weight of her most destabilising moments. Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x) operates differently. Its insights are distributed across the hour rather than concentrated into one defining gesture. This is not so much a flaw as a reflection of its method, which favours accumulation over shock.

Humour frequently provides release just as situations threaten to turn more abrasive. Awkward encounters and moments of casual humiliation tilt towards laughter before they are allowed to harden. The effect is to keep the work open and inviting, even as its critique remains clear. The anger is felt, but carefully modulated, never allowed to overwhelm the balance of the piece.

As a piece of theatre, Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x) is smart, controlled, and confidently made. With a strong performer, a clear voice, and a sharply defined perspective, it offers an intelligent and engaging examination of class as lived experience rather than an abstract idea. Any further life beyond the stage will take its own shape, but here, in the room, the work stands securely on its own terms.

There’s something faintly uncanny about The Woman in Black still stalking our stages as it edges towards 40. A theatrical juggernaut that refuses to die, it creaks a little now, but like any good ghost, that sense of age and wear might actually be part of its lingering, peculiar charm.

From the off, this feels steeped in the traditions of old-school chillers: the kind of story you might swap around a fire, all flicker and shadow and suggestion doing the heavy lifting. It’s undeniably atmospheric, but also unmistakably slow to get going, with the opening stretching out like fog across a marsh—thick, deliberate, and in no real hurry to lift. You can almost feel the machinery being assembled in front of you: here’s the frame, here’s how it works, now settle in and listen. It demands a degree of patience, and not every audience member will be inclined to meet it halfway.

What continues to land, though, is that central theatrical sleight of hand: the shifting, slippery line between actor and Arthur Kipps. That gradual handover, that sense of the storyteller dissolving into the story itself, is where the play really finds its pulse. It’s a simple device, and perhaps a slightly creaky one by modern standards, but there’s still something quietly clever in the way it draws you in, like watching a magician use a well-worn deck of cards and somehow still pulling off the trick.

And once it does properly click into place, it really begins to tighten its grip. The second half closes in like a vice, the air sharpening almost imperceptibly until what once felt polite and measured starts to feel distinctly predatory. This is where the show earns its reputation: a proper yarn, spun with confidence and control, pulling you deeper and deeper until you find yourself leaning forward without quite realising when it happened.

That said, this particular performance didn’t always land its punches with complete precision. A handful of cues, perhaps the inevitable gremlins of an early performance in a new space, felt just a fraction out of sync, and in a show that lives and dies on timing, that margin matters. Moments that should have detonated with a jolt instead softened on impact, shifting from full-blooded shrieks to something closer to restrained jump scares. It’s not a fatal flaw by any means, but it does take the edge off what should be sharper, more visceral shocks.

Even so, what remains genuinely impressive is just how much is conjured from so little. Robin Herford’s production is built on economy and precision: two actors, a sparse set, and a reliance on techniques that might now be considered almost old-fashioned, yet still prove remarkably effective. Michael Holt’s stage subtly tilts the world off its axis, giving the sense that the ground itself can’t quite be trusted, while Kevin Sleep uses light and shadow like brushstrokes, allowing illumination to drain away until the space feels thick with darkness. It becomes less about what is shown and more about what might be waiting just beyond the edge of sight.

Performance-wise, it remains a tightly controlled two-hander. Daniel Burke serves as the audience’s way in, an effective everyman whose growing unease gives the supernatural elements something solid to push against. Opposite him, John Mackay moves between multiple roles with quiet assurance, never overplaying the shifts but instead keeping them grounded and legible, which ultimately serves the storytelling far better than any showier transformation might.

It’s also impossible now not to view this through the lens of what came after. The 2012 film, with Daniel Radcliffe front and centre, leant far more heavily into gothic visuals and cinematic dread, turning suggestion into something more explicit and polished. It works, in its way, but it also proves the point: what the film shows you, the stage version makes you imagine—and often that’s the more unsettling route. In a theatre landscape now populated by slicker, more overtly frightening shows like 2:22 A Ghost Story and Paranormal Activity, this production can feel almost quaint by comparison, its scares softer, its touch lighter.

One of the most telling elements of the evening, however, is the audience itself. School groups clustered in the circle sit in near-total silence through the slower, more expository passages—a feat in itself—before erupting into gasps, laughter, and nervous energy when the tension finally snaps. You can feel the production working on them in real time, and for many, this will likely be a first encounter with live theatre. On that level alone, it’s still doing something vital.

And yet, there’s no escaping the sense that the show now carries its age a little more visibly. In a theatrical landscape where stage horror is undergoing something of a renaissance, becoming bolder, more inventive, and often more visceral, The Woman in Black can feel like a beautifully preserved relic from a different era. Its restraint, once razor-sharp, now occasionally reads as softness.

And still, there’s a reason it endures. This is the Godfather, the blueprint that so much else has followed. Strip everything back, dim the lights, and trust a story to do the work, and audiences will still lean in.

Three stars, then. A little frayed at the edges, a little gentler in its scares than it once was, but when the lights go out, it still knows exactly where to stand.

In the 1990s, you got the yellow-and-black promise of “…For Dummies”: culture boiled down, intimidating things made palatable, a wink that said this isn’t the real thing, but it’ll do. Back then, that felt useful. Now, with the sum of human knowledge rattling around in our pockets, we’re in a stranger place—less mastered, perhaps, but infinitely more informed. Which makes the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) feel like a dog-eared manual from a different age: still energetic, still eager, but no longer essential.

Because we’ve moved on. Shakespeare parody has moved on. Shakespeare in Love managed to be both playful and literate nearly three decades ago; Upstart Crow did it weekly with more bite and more brains. They wink at the Bard, but they also understand him. This, by contrast, feels closer to a late-night student revue: big swings, broad gags, and the occasional flicker of something sharper that never quite catches fire.

The hook is still a good one: three performers tackling all 37 plays in one go. But it’s a hook that quickly slips. The 16 comedies are tossed into a blink-and-it’s-gone mash-up; King Lear barely has time to hand over the kingdom before it’s whisked away again. Instead, the show huddles around the familiar warmth of the “big hitters”,Romeo and Juliet opens the evening, while Hamlet sprawls across an entire act. It’s less “complete works” than festival headliners.

And maybe that would be fine if the comedy had edge. But too often it feels like chewing gum that’s lost its flavour, still being worked, still elastic, but not giving you much back. The wordplay, the obvious goldmine, is oddly underused. Jokes land with a soft thud where they should snap. Around me, the audience laughed more than I did, which is always a slightly lonely place to sit, like being at a party where everyone else got the invite memo.

When the show does pause and let Shakespeare breathe, though, something shifts. A simple “I have lost my mirth” from Hamlet lands clean and true, suddenly cutting through the noise. For a moment, the production remembers the power of the thing it’s sending up. You wish it trusted that more.

The strongest sequences lean into a clearer comic idea. The Titus Andronicus segment, reimagined as a deranged cooking show, is properly inventive, grisly, silly, and finally in control of its own joke. And the recurring vomit gag has a kind of anarchic commitment to it. It’s crude, but at least it’s decisive. 

Attempts to update the material feel thinner. References to Ozempic and Taylor Swift drop in like loose change, recognisable, briefly shiny, but not doing much. They don’t build into anything, don’t refract the material in an interesting way. It’s the difference between a joke that lands and one that just arrives.

The performances keep things afloat. Efè Agwele, Woogie Jung and Kiran Raywilliams (on as understudy) are personable, high-energy, and clearly committed to the bit. They move well together, keep the pace up, and never let the thing stall completely. But there’s a sense of skating over the surface rather than digging in. Of the three, Raywilliams shows the strongest feel for the verse, the lines sit more comfortably, the rhythm more assured, hinting at a deeper well than the production really draws from.

And that’s the frustration. There are moments here; glints, really; where the show feels like it might sharpen, might find a more contemporary voice, might justify its place in a landscape already crowded with smarter Shakespeare riffs. But it keeps defaulting to the obvious, the easy, the already-worn.

Like those “…For Dummies” books, it simplifies, it condenses, it reassures you that this will be painless. But in 2026, painless isn’t enough. We want something that knows the material and plays with it, not just at it.

This abridgement, for all its energy, feels a little too reduced.

The promise of a play by Kae Tempest should feel like striking a match. A voice so distinct, so rhythmically alive, you expect sparks. And yet, returning to Paradise in Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s production at the Station, that same old feeling creeps back in. I remember leaving the original at the National Theatre deflated—how did this land so flat? A second viewing doesn’t shift the dial. If anything, it confirms the problem runs deeper than any one production. 

Tempest’s take on Philoctetes should be molten: an ancient wound split open in a modern world. Instead, it arrives dulled. A broken soldier—abandoned, festering, half-myth, half-man—rots on the edge of a makeshift community. Into this comes a young recruit, sent with orders, carrying not just command but inheritance—the long shadow of an absent father, the heroic ghost of Achilles pressing in. Around them, a chorus of the displaced circle like witnesses or ghosts. Trust is bartered, truth bent, loyalties tested. It should feel like a fuse burning toward something inevitable. Instead, it splutters. 

There’s a clear through-line with the season’s opener, Days of Significance. That play surges forward—youth, bravado, beer-fuelled decisions tipping into the machinery of war. Paradise is the hangover. The comedown. The part where the body keeps the score long after the rhetoric has faded. It’s a smart pairing on paper: one charts the road in, the other the wreckage left behind. But where Williams writes with a punch that lands in the gut, Tempest’s blows here feel strangely padded. 

The language is the culprit. Or rather, the absence of its usual electricity. Tempest’s words often move like music; here they sit, heavy, unmoving. Long stretches of dialogue unspool without lift, like engines turning over but never catching. When it doesn’t land, and too often it doesn’t, the scenes drag, exposing the scaffolding of the form. You start to feel the weight of every minute. At two hours, it’s a long sit for a play that never quite finds its rhythm. 

Iqbal Khan’s production doesn’t manage to break that inertia. The Station’s intimacy presses in from all sides. At points, that claustrophobia works, the sense of people with nowhere to go, no space to breathe. But this is a story with myth in its bones. It needs air, scale, the suggestion of something larger than the here and now. Without that, it shrinks. What should echo feels boxed in. 

There are glimpses of a stronger visual language. Liv Jackson’s ramshackle shack is a small success: a heap of bric-a-brac, bin fires flickering like dying signals, barbed wire hanging overhead like a threat that never quite lifts. It gives us a world—fractured, makeshift, lived-in. But the direction rarely builds on it. Too often, actors are left planted, delivering dense text into the void. 

The chorus suffers most. Neither fully formed individuals nor a cohesive collective, they hover in a kind of dramatic no-man’s-land. There are flashes—Diya Vencataasawmy’s Taya, Honor Wiggins’s Yasmin, and Daisy Graceson’s Yorkshire elder Jelly, a wry, weathered presence cutting through with flashes of grounded humour—but they don’t accumulate into anything substantial. The decision to give the leader a microphone gestures at grandeur, at ritual, but lands as a slightly baffling gimmick, more distraction than revelation. 

Performance-wise, there are still embers. Olivia Carvill burns brightest as Philoctetes, all rot and rage, a body turned into a battlefield. You can almost smell the character before she speaks. Her eyes flicker with something unsteady—part memory, part delusion—and when she leans into past glories, it lands with a tragic, contemporary sting. Elise Ria Harrison gives Neoptolemus a clear internal pull, navigating complex feelings about that absent father and the myth of Achilles, beginning to sense that orders handed down aren’t always right. Meanwhile, Beau Bradfield’s Odysseus is boxed into a version of villainy that feels too fixed to breathe. 

Ultimately, Paradise feels like a play that keeps reaching for myth but never quite leaves the ground. The ideas are there; war, abandonment, moral compromise; but the language doesn’t ignite them, and the staging can’t supply the missing spark. In a theatrical landscape where contemporary adaptations of Greek drama have found urgency and bite, this one feels oddly airless. 

What should blaze lingers instead—smoke without fire. 

In its co-production between Bristol Old Vic and Shakespeare’s Globe, Holly Race Roughan’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream feels like someone has taken a familiar painting and dragged a blade across the surface. The picture is still recognisable, but the cuts are deliberate. Sometimes they reveal something new. Sometimes they just scar the canvas. And here, in a striking conceptual shift, the world of the play is transported from its usual lush summer heat into something far colder, a winter of emotional frost and brittle hierarchy. It’s a production I’m deeply torn on. 

On one hand, Race Roughan’s directorial vision pops. It’s sharp, legible, and emotionally precise. Character relationships are crystal clear, the text lands with purpose, and the emotional pressure points are hit with accuracy. The play’s undercurrents – power, class, desire – are dragged into the light. The comedy feels less like woodland whimsy and more like a societal pressure cooker. 

Max Johns’ set underlines that world immediately. A long, gleaming banquet table stretches across a slick white floor like an operating table. Everything is pristine, clinical, a display case for aristocratic power. It’s Athens as a kind of high-end laboratory where the characters are specimens pinned under glass. When the action slips into the forest, the shift isn’t leafy or magical, it’s psychological. The same world just cracked open. 

But there’s another side to this Dream, and it’s where the production becomes frustrating. There’s a sense throughout that the show doesn’t quite trust Shakespeare’s language to do the lifting. Instead, it piles on interventions, modern gestures, tonal shifts, conceptual nudges, that don’t so much reveal the text anew as wrestle with it. You can feel the dramaturgy grinding away under the floorboards. 

Some of those ideas are electric. The soundscape pulls in Billie Eilish, giving the forest scenes a low, contemporary thrum, the sense that something dark and hormonal is pulsing just beneath the surface. There are also several striking balletic sequences that nod toward the famous Ashton ballet, briefly letting movement tell the story rather than concept. 

Sergo Vares’s Puck is another inspired shift. Gone is the mischievous woodland sprite. This Puck is colder, stranger — less playful trickster than malevolent observer. The kind of creature who watches chaos unfold with quiet satisfaction. 

Hedydd Dylan’s Titania arrives like a gothic rock enchantress, all strange sensuality and simmering desire, a figure spiritually adjacent to PJ Harvey. She’s magnetic, a performance that really adds a class to its concept. When the surrounding world cranks up the violence, Titania dials down, vivacious life brought down by systemic abuse. 

The four lovers are clearly defined. Tiwa Lade’s Hermia moves through the forest with determined wit, holding her own in the chaos. Lou Jackson’s Demetrius has a quietly sharp edge, his arrogance just enough to unsettle Helena, his eyes at its bold conclusion suggesting another tyrant in the making. David Olaniregun’s Lysander is earnest and slightly fumbling, his devotion tipping into chaos, while Tara Tijani’s Helena pursues Demetrius with persistent energy. Together, the four spin through tangled desires and misunderstandings, turning the forest into a kind of human pinball machine, where love ricochets unpredictably, messy, comic, and tinged with danger. 

Then there’s Danny Kirrane’s Bottom, perhaps the production’s boldest reinvention. Here he’s an executive chef in Theseus’ household, ducking out to sniff cocaine between his amateur dramatics escapades. It’s a funny image at first, the working man numbing himself before another humiliating brush with power. And Kirrane clearly knows how to handle Shakespeare’s verse when he’s allowed to speak it. The problem is he rarely gets the chance. Too much of Bottom’s text is drowned out by modern asides, bits of comic business, or conceptual framing. Instead of sharpening the comedy, the additions blur it. You keep catching glimpses of a great Shakespearean performance underneath, like a radio signal struggling through static. 

The final moments push the production’s instincts to their limit. The ending lands with something close to a Tarantino-style flourish: sudden, brutal, deliberately provocative. It certainly raises questions. Whether it brings clarity is debatable. 

Still, and this is why the show ultimately lands at three stars rather than two, it is never dull. There’s bold ambition here. A genuine attempt to make theatre feel urgent, visceral and contemporary rather than safe or decorative. I admired its nerve. I admired the clarity of its vision. I just wish it trusted the language a little more, that it would let the fireworks already sitting inside the play explode on their own, rather than constantly lighting new ones beside them. 

When I first saw Days of Significance at the Tricyle (now Kiln) in 2008, it felt like someone had struck a match in a petrol‑soaked room, a modern masterpiece that roared with energy and passion, its dialogue sparking with wit. Natalie Simone’s BOVTS revival doesn’t just rekindle that flame; she pours fresh accelerant on it. The world has moved on since the early 2000s, but the anxieties the play wrestles with, a generation strutting its bravado on sticky nightclub floors while a distant war loomed, feel just as volatile now as the world seems primed to tap into another Armageddon. Simone taps that energy like she’s tuning a live wire.  

The early street and club scenes are a glorious explosion of sweat, neon, and chaos, poetic in its insults, teetering on Renaissance painting indecency. Those of us who survived mid‑00s clubbing will recognise the landscape instantly: the lava‑lamp glow of cheap alcopops, the thrum of bass vibrating through pavement cracks, the peacocking and posturing on streets slick with spilled drink. Then comes the wedding, forty minutes of delirious, overlapping character work, staged with such confidence it feels like the roof might lift off. It’s a carnival tent of emotions: raucous, tender, hysterical, and strangely moving.  

If there’s a wobble, it’s the Iraq scenes. While the play’s middle act is often framed as taut, dangerous, and morally scorching, here the heat dissipates, the explosions feel distant, like fireworks scanned from several postcodes away. The grit, the life‑and‑death immediacy, remains stuck to the soles of the characters’ boots back in their hometown. It doesn’t sink the production, but the centre feels a little hollow where it should punch the hardest.  

What really ignites Simone’s vision is the cast; a group who move like a storm front rolling in. Amé Emore’s Hannah begins as a quiet figure at the edges, but much like Hero in Much Ado, she becomes the lodestar of the whole piece. Emore plays her with the calm, luminous intensity of a candle that somehow burns brighter as the room gets wilder. By the time the final act lands, she has slipped into the role of emotional truth‑teller, grounding the production with both hurt and hope that tugs at its audiences heart. Violet Harvey’s Trish, tears through scenes with sharp, glittering edges. Her verbal snap pairs perfectly with Albi Dawkins’ Ben, whose foul‑mouthed, rabble‑rousing edge marks him out as a lit dynamite fuse. Together, they create a brilliantly roughened, street‑worn Benedick and Beatrice, not trading elegant wordplay in Tuscan sunshine but hurling barbed jokes across nightclub queues and kebab‑shop thresholds. Their chemistry doesn’t just drive the early scenes; it detonates them.  

And then there’s Elysia Showan’s Clare, She is the evening’s comic firework display, a bridezilla whose descent from tipsy to gloriously bawdy is orchestrated with exquisite physical precision. Her performance is a kind of comic slow‑motion collapse: handbag dangling, veil askew, dignity unravelling like tinsel in a rainstorm. She turns the wedding into a riot of colour, chaos, and human frailty, and the production is infinitely richer for it.  

Simone’s Days of Significance is a riotous, gut‑punching, neon‑slicked revival that feels both nostalgic and unnervingly present. The war sequences may not hit with the force they could, but the street scenes and the barnstorming wedding more than compensate, and the cast deliver performances that crackle with life. This is a production that doesn’t just restage Roy Williams’ world; it throws it like a Molotov through the door of 2026. 

Deadman’s The Freshwater Five arrives at the Blakehay with no shortage of dramatic weight. The true 2011 case of five Isle of Wight fishermen; Jamie Green, Jon Beere, Daniel Payne, Scott Birtwistle and Zoran Dresic; convicted of smuggling £53 million of cocaine despite their consistent claims of innocence, carries all the ingredients of a gripping theatrical narrative. It has scale, human cost, and a community divided. It is, in many ways, a story already humming with electricity. 

On paper, the production seems well‑equipped to channel that potential. Inspired by the Today in Focus podcast, it blends verbatim accounts, poetic monologues, music, and stylised physical sequences under Samuel Bossman’s direction and Liam Patrick Harrison’s writing. Its thematic span is broad: collapsing coastal economies, maritime folklore, immigration anxieties, and the daily pressures faced by working‑class seafarers. With material this rich, one anticipates a piece with focus, cohesion, and emotional drive. What emerges instead feels unexpectedly unsettled. 

The production shifts between forms so frequently that it never builds a sustained dramatic rhythm. Documentary theatre dissolves into poetic fragments; these give way to bursts of music or sudden stylised movement. While eclecticism can, in the right hands, deepen the texture of a piece, here the effect is closer to flicking through channels on a television with a faulty aerial. At times, the style edges into League of Gentlemen: Legs Akimbo territory; earnest, energetic, but teetering on the edge of the unintentionally comic.

Scenes that should build tension instead lose shape. The contradictions in the evidence, the impact on the families, the long unanswered questions, these moments ought to land with weight. The chains should be tightening; instead they loosen. Even the central question the play poses explicitly, were these men innocent fishermen or smugglers?, never gathers the momentum required to truly grip. We are shown the dilemma but rarely pulled into it. 

The sheer number of themes the piece attempts to juggle contributes to the problem. Economic decline, immigration, folklore, maritime identity, each one is relevant, but the production rarely allows any idea the time or clarity it needs to develop fully. The result is not a layered work, but a scattered one: a series of ideas placed side by side rather than woven together. The emotional core of the story, the families’ grief, the men’s continued fight for justice, the unresolved contradictions, remains oddly distant. 

Pacing becomes a significant issue. Moments that demand urgency unfold with surprising slackness, and the continual shifts in form repeatedly interrupt the build of dramatic pressure. The result is a piece that feels longer than its runtime, its energy ebbing well before the final scenes. 

By the end, The Freshwater Five has not delivered the emotional or narrative payoff its source material promises. This is a story with genuine power: real lives altered, reputations reshaped, and a legal battle that continues to provoke debate. It should feel like a tide gathering force, building inexorably. Here, though, it never rises much above a ripple. 

For the past twenty-five years, Shakespeare and Tobacco Factory Theatres have shared a symbiotic relationship. Andrew Hilton’s rep company rose alongside the venue from very humble beginnings; even its folding felt pointedly timed with the theatre’s own struggles — struggles still faintly visible in the caps-in-hand appeal that follows each curtain call. Which is why this moment under Heidi Vaughan feels so assured. After a few patchy years, Shakespeare here feels like a wonder again. Last year’s The Winter’s Tale brought the two worlds of Bohemia and censorship into sharp, intelligent dialogue. This Macbeth is stronger still.

It is, quite simply, a space built for the Bard. In the round, each audience member sits close enough to see the sweat. That proximity lets us lock into the characters’ interior worlds; soliloquies are delivered as though spoken directly to us. In a play obsessed with secrecy and suspicion, that matters. There is no safe corner, no true privacy. Conspiracies unfold in full view. Guilt has nowhere to retreat. The circular staging tightens the action like a vice — Scotland feels contained, events looping inward with grim inevitability.

Clarity remains the house virtue. Hilton’s productions were renowned for it; the same could be said here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Macbeth so clear in its understanding of text and motivation. Even the England scene, so often dramatically slack, makes compelling sense — men debating and playing at the fair line between good and evil. The moral argument feels live, not dutiful.

Stu McLoughlin’s Macbeth sits squarely at the centre of that clarity. Already a Bristol theatrical legend for his work with Living Spit, he doesn’t immediately present as a natural warrior. Early on he is jovial, light, almost unprepossessing — seemingly unfit to serve the prophecies the witches utter. That choice becomes the engine of the performance. After Duncan’s murder, his soul appears shattered, fear and tears stretched across his face. McLoughlin charts the erosion carefully, scene by scene, allowing the weight of consequence to settle visibly.

Perhaps the very darkest reaches of the role slightly elude him, but the final movements are quietly devastating. When told of his wife’s death, there is a dead-behind-the-eyes acceptance — what will be will be. The last battles are fought without flourish, with the stripped resolve of a man who understands exactly where the road has led.

Vaughan is equally precise in tracing the disintegration of the marriage. The scenes in which Patrycja Kujawska’s Lady Macbeth realises she has lost her husband down a dark path are very clearly realised. If Kujawska’s Lady M is more a physical creature than an assured verse speaker, it works. She feels elemental, instinctive — the spark to his slow implosion. Watching the balance of power tilt and fracture gives the production much of its emotional charge.

This is a production loaded with atmosphere. The witches have never been presented better: their lines recorded, whispered and echoing around the space so that the theatre itself seems complicit. Figures draped in cloaks move with a jerking, primitive hurly burly, while Natalia Chan’s lighting turns the trees orange and red as though we have been plunged right into the centre of hell. In this tight arena, sound presses close; evil feels intimate, not abstract.

The supporting cast is rich with familiar local talent. Saikat Ahamed lends Banquo an Everyman steadiness that grounds the supernatural. Alice Barclay delivers her verse with customary clarity and poise. The ensemble is cohesive, confident, alert to the muscularity of the text.

If the production stops short of the truly great Macbeths, it is in its handling of violence. The slaughter is slightly bloodless — the chills tingle rather than descend to show us the depths. One occasionally longs for a greater sense of rupture.

Still, with an excellent McLoughlin demonstrating exactly why he is a local legend, and a production that marries textual precision with thick, immersive atmosphere, it is more than fair to say that Shakespeare at Tobacco Factory Theatres is well and truly back near the top of the pantheon.