REVIEW: Home, I'm Darling (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

My favourite aspect of Home, I'm Darling could be considered a spoiler, so I'll clue you in at the end and give you fair warning. But it's no spoiler to say that this play, written by Laura Wade and directed by Theatr Clwyd's artistic director Tamara Harvey, is a real blast, daddy-o!

Judy and Johnny are in love with the 1950s: the threads, the nests, the frocks, the decor, the sounds, the chariots, the designs, the works! They first met through their mutual love of the period and became soul mates, visiting 1950s events such as JiveFest and indulging their passion with their friends Fran and Marcus. Both have well-paid gigs (Judy's better paid than Johnny), but one day, Judy decides she's had enough of her high-flying managerial job in finance, and the couple agree she should cop a breeze, and become a housewife instead. Rather, a 1950s housewife...

REVIEW: Turn of the Screw (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

Thirty years ago, Stephen Mallatrat's masterful adaptation of Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black changed the way that ghost stories were told on the stage. Anybody who has seen either the West End or the touring version of the play will know how bone-chillingly effective the production is even today, especially if you don't know what to expect. Mallatrat's The Woman in Black remains the standard by which all other theatrical ghost stories must be held, and Tim Luscombe's version of the Henry James 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw is no different - especially as it mentions it in publicity.

Different people find different things scary, and there are very different approaches to making things scary within the horror/ supernatural genre. There's out-and-out gorefests, and the productions that go for the visceral as well as the visual (Ghost Stories, The Soulless Ones), while there's also the spooky, eerie, atmospherically charged productions - such as The Woman in Black - which creep up on the senses and shout BOO!

REVIEW: The Assassination of Katie Hopkins (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

Everybody has an opinion these days. Including me. However, I'm invited to give my opinion (and sometimes paid to do it). But what about all the people who have opinions that nobody asked for? Are they still valid? Do people still want to hear them? Do people need to hear them?

The truth is, everybody's opinion is valid, but not every opinion is welcome. Social media allows the individual to speak to the masses at the touch of a button, and they can put as much or as little thought and research into that opinion as they like.

This frenetic new musical, written by Chris Bush and composed by Matt Winkworth, attempts to open up the national debate about freedom of speech, and whether what's called "hate speech" should be just as free as all the self-congratulatory back-patting and celebrity worship that happens online. For every tweet simpering over the birth of a new #royalbaby, there's another slamming the Duchess of Cambridge for looking too glamorous just hours after giving birth. For every #BlackPower hashtag, there's a thread bemoaning the loss of Little England and what it means to be British (and white).

REVIEW: The Weir (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

Back in the 1970s, the film company Amicus made several portmanteau horror films which told eerie, sometimes light-hearted, but always gruesome tales of misfortune and tragedy. They were like Hammer films, but more lurid and macabre.

Conor McPherson's The Weir - celebrating its 20th anniversary this year - would make a cracking portmanteau horror film, with its four spine-chilling folk tales framed by an overarching story about a bunch of people whiling away an evening in a rural Irish pub. There's even a bonus tale in the form of a melancholy reminiscence of lost love and missed opportunity.

There's a good reason why McPherson won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 1999, because The Weir is a haunting, bittersweet, sometimes unsettling, often heartwarming story which beautifully reflects the laid-back, pastoral way of life in rural Ireland, as well as showing how we all carry with us our own demons and fears, which are often waiting keenly to jump to the surface if we let them.

REVIEW: The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

At the heart of Jim Cartwright's play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is a touching, sentimental story of a shy northern girl struggling to get heard by those around her, including her brash and selfish mother, who treats her the same way wicked stepmothers treat their Cinderellas. But at over two and a half hours in length, Cartwright struggles to fill the time with enough plot to make it as riveting as it should be.

The play (which opened at the National Theatre in 1992 and was written specifically for Jane Horrocks) was adapted into a film in 1998, and tells the story of a shy girl who can do stunningly accurate impressions of divas such as Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland and Edith Piaf after listening to her beloved late father's LP collection. However, the film was significantly more concise in its plotting. Kate Wasserberg's production of the play packs plenty of wallop when it's needed, but there are also a few too many moments of ponderous water-treading, moments which allow the audience to shift in their seat, hoping something will happen soon.

This is particularly noticeable in Act 1, where too much time is spent building up characters who don't require that much time to be fleshed out. The audience gets what the playwright's trying to do much quicker than he does himself. In particular, LV's harridan mother Mari, a stereotypical northern sexpot straight out of the Lily Savage school of termagent matriarchs. All the hallmarks of such a part are there - the too-tight leopard skin skirts and heels, the flashing knickers, the sharp, foul-mouthed tongue and the total disregard for the feelings and needs of those around her. Nicola Reynolds throws everything she's got into Mari Hoff, perhaps more than she should at times, making her a loud, brash, abusive, unpleasant gorgon who cares more about her drinks cabinet and her sex life than her meek daughter. Cartwright may have written the role broadly, but with every part like this, there has to be a more human side, and unfortunately we get to see far too much of the tart and not nearly enough of the heart.

INTERVIEW: Actor Catrin Aaron on playing Little Voice at Theatr Clwyd

Imagine a stage show where the late, great Judy Garland tops the bill, and the support acts are Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe and Billie Holiday. Apart from the tiresome "some of them are dead" problem, you'd pay good money to see that show, wouldn't you?

Well, now you can, because Theatr Clwyd is staging a brand new production of Jim Cartwright's classic The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, which was specially written for actor Jane Horrocks back in 1992 for the National Theatre. Most people will remember the Oscar-nominated film from 1998, also starring Horrocks, but Theatr Clwyd's take casts the multi-talented Catrin Aaron as the shy, reclusive LV.

"I've never worked on a musical before," admits Catrin, "although I wouldn't really class Little Voice as a musical. It's more of a comedy drama with music."

Catrin trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and has got background in singing performance, including many educational and Christmas shows, "but this is the first time I've done it on my own," she laughs.

REVIEW: Uncle Vanya (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

OK, let's get the headline out of the way first - Jamie Ballard is simply extraordinary in (and as) Uncle Vanya. Voted by the Guardian as one of the "ten best Hamlets ever", Ballard is an absolute revelation as a man whose entire life has been dictated to and shaped by other people's, whether it be the death of his sister, an unrequited love, or his supercilious brother-in-law. Vanya is one of life's great losers, and Jamie Ballard not so much plays the part as inhabits it.

One of the biggest problems some people have with theatre is the suspension of belief. When you watch a film or TV drama, you already know subconsciously that none of it is real, and you accept that, because you're watching these people on an oblong flatscreen several feet in front of you, like a window into a universe of fiction. But when you're at the theatre, sitting just feet away from a live action performance, you're being asked to believe that the drama is really happening right in front of you, as in life, and that can be harder for some people to swallow. Sometimes, audiences treat it as a challenge - "Convince me!" they smirk. "Convince me that you're really in that three-walled kitchen and feeling suicidal!"

The magic of live theatre is when the audience is utterly convinced that what they're witnessing is real, when they are duped into accepting the facts of the fiction before them because the talent and experience behind it is just too damn good. Achieving verisimilitude is a constant ambition for theatre makers, and director Tamara Harvey achieves it in spades in Theatr Clwyd's Uncle Vanya.

INTERVIEW: Actor Jamie Ballard on Uncle Vanya at Theatr Clwyd

In 2010, the Guardian's Susannah Clapp listed actor Jamie Ballard as one of her "ten best Hamlets", alongside high profile figures such as Henry Irving, John Gielgud, David Tennant and Mark Rylance. Jamie played the Prince of Denmark in Jonathan Miller's production at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory in 2008, but is now swapping tragedy for comedy as he's about to take on the title role in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya for Theatr Clwyd in Mold.

But hold on. People don't generally associate the 19th century Russian playwright with laughs and giggles, do they?

"Chekhov thought of his plays as comedies," says Jamie. "It was only his creative relationship with Constantin Stanislavski [the Russian theatre practitioner who staged a pioneering version of Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1898] that made the perception of his work all heavy and serious."

REVIEW: Out of Love (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

What is it, that "fire between women", as playwright Elinor Cook calls it? Not even the main characters in this thoughtful play can admit to defining that special and particular relationship that women have. One might say that friendship is merely a ceasefire between women, but that's too harsh, too simple a definition. It's much more complex than that.

Cook's Out of Love examines the friendship between two women over the course of a couple of decades. They grow up together, as close friends, but inevitably drift apart as their adult lives begin to develop and divert. On the one hand we have the sensible yet sensitive Lorna, all thick blonde curls and brave faces, while on the other we have the more outgoing Grace, a bundle of energy and ideas lacking a driving focus. We see these two girls at different stages of their lives together, as children, as teenagers, and as grown adults, and the story is both tragic and heart-warming.

REVIEW: BoHo (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

Working in the City is hard. It's stressful. Maybe it's not as hard as coal mining or fire-fighting, and not as stressful as policing or soldiering, but in context, city slickers have a tough time, not least because of the pressures they put on themselves to be successful. To beat their colleagues and to be the best, no matter how or what.

David Jones is just another cog in the giant wheel of this industry. He wears a sharp suit, maintains a healthy body, and is great in bed (or so he tells us). But what happens when the pressure to maintain this vision of perfection starts to get too much, and the veneer begins to crumble?

Although BoHo - a co-production between Theatr Clwyd and Hijinx - takes city slicker David as its central character, this "dystopian musical misadventure" is not strictly about bankers and financiers. David is an avatar for us all, for each and every one of us making our way through life in the best way we know how. David, for all his sharp-suited, pill-popping trappings, is an everyman who hurts and feels and struggles just like the rest of us.

INTERVIEW: Playwright Brad Birch on Black Mountain (Paines Plough, Theatr Clwyd)

A script is like a recipe – the playwright sets out the ingredients and their properties, but it takes a team of chefs to cook up the finished dish. That's how Brad Birch, whose latest play Black Mountain will receive its world premiere at Mold's Theatr Clwyd on July 11th, thinks about his various creations.

Brad's work is far more than a simple list of ingredients, however. As writer in residence with the Welsh new writing theatre company Undeb, as well as being attached to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Brad has enjoyed his fair share of successes, whether it's receiving the prestigious Harold Pinter Commission in 2016 to write a new play for the Royal Court, or winning a Scotsman Edinburgh Fringe First Award for his 2013 play Gardening: For the Unfulfilled and Alienated.

The Mid Wales-born writer penned his first piece, The Snow Queen, in 2008 for Mid Powys Youth Theatre, and has since seen his work produced by Cardiff's Sherman (Light Arrested Between the Curtain and the Glass, 2011), the Royal Court (Permafrost, 2011, and Where the Shot Rabbits Lay, 2012), Dirty Protest (Milton, 2013), the Royal Exchange (Tender Bolus, 2014) and the Orange Tree (The Brink, 2016), among others.

REVIEW: The Importance of Being Earnest (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

The last production I saw of Oscar Wilde's 1895 classic The Importance of Being Earnest lived up to the common conception that the play is a rather fusty, stilted, mildly amusing drawing-room comedy, performed with stiff upper lips and an air of superiority to the audience.

Not so with Richard Fitch's blisteringly energetic new production at Theatr Clwyd, which takes Wilde's magnum opus, holds it up to the light, decides that it's actually perfectly good as it is, but places it back down on the stage with a youthful enthusiasm that its creator would've revelled in.

The hallmarks of the play are all still there: the period setting, the lavish 19th century costumes, the acerbic and witty dialogue, the thematic intent to scratch the veneer of Victorian society to see what lies beneath. Everything that somebody going to see The Importance of Being Earnest would expect to see is there, but Fitch has given the presentation a jolly good shake and as a result, gives the play a fresh lease of life.

REVIEW: National Dance Company Wales Spring 2017 (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

What I love about Caroline Finn is the eccentricity she brings to her work. Finn, the Artistic Director of NDC Wales and choreographer of The Green House, has an innate ability to tap into the "Britishness" of a situation, and as a result comes up with such quirky, endearing and aesthetically powerful works as The Green House.

This whimsy is also present in past works such as Bernadette, Bloom and Folk, an ability to mine an off-kilter oddness, whether that be the misplaced hubris of baking (Bernadette) or the solemn, melancholic face masks used in Bloom. Indeed, the fundamental atmosphere of Folk, with its pastoral aesthetic, was another manifestation of Finn's skill at shining light on the quirkier corners of our culture.

With The Green House, Finn has arguably crossed the Pond to soak up some of the tropes of American culture, especially those deep-seated in the 1950s - that I Love Lucy '50s housewife vibe, mixed with a Stepford Wives oddness most familiar today through its Desperate Housewives filter, and, as the programme notes point out, the bizarre other-world of David Lynch.

REVIEW: Gabriel (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

The Channel Islands were the only British territory occupied by German forces during World War Two. The UK government did not deem Jersey or Guernsey strategic in its fight against Hitler, and so quietly backed away, allowing the Nazis to settle there in June 1940. The thing was, the islands were of no particular use to Germany either, except for the fact it allowed the Nazis to say they'd captured British soil.

Moira Buffini's Gabriel is set on Guernsey in 1943 in the depths of the German occupation and shows what life was like for the women left to survive there after their men had gone to war, and thousands of other islanders had been evacuated. Guernsey was cut off from the realities of war: the Germans banned any communication with the mainland and clamped down on attempts to distribute a newsletter among the islanders based on information gathered from the secret monitoring of BBC radio broadcasts. As far as the people of Guernsey knew, the war would never end.

Buffini's play tries to say many things - about the roles and strengths of women during the occupation, about hope and fear, about the definition of evil - but the through-lines get muddled up and sometimes lost in Kate McGregor's dry production. You get the feeling the script has more to say than the production is allowing, and that the actors are fighting hard to make their characters reach the point.

REVIEW: Scarlett (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

We've all wanted to just throw in the towel and run away sometimes, haven't we? When the daily humdrummery of life gets too montonous, or repetitive, or just too damn hard, we've had those thoughts about not turning up the next day, and simply disappearing. A new life with new rules. A new you!

This is how Scarlett feels. She rocks up somewhere in rural Wales with the intention of buying a rundown stone chapel, restoring it and living there for the rest of her days, away from the noise and bustle and stress of London life. And when she's asked about her life back home, and what she's left behind, Scarlett initially blanks it off - she has a business she plans to close down, a mother and daughter she denies exist. Scarlett is simply desperate to escape, both her own life and those within it.

Colette Kane - winner of the Royal Literary Fund's JB Priestley Award in 2013 and now a burgeoning playwright for stage and screen - is a remarkable talent. This play is intelligent and thought-provoking, it is vital and funny and revealing, and gives a rattlingly honest portrayal of the nature of the relationship between mothers and daughters of all generations. Kane's script is so arresting and insightful that by the end of the 75-minute piece, you feel a deep connection with the five characters. In short, Kane is a gift to the stage.

INTERVIEW: Tamara Harvey, Artistic Director of Theatr Clwyd

When Tamara Harvey talks about Junkyard – the new musical from the prestigious pens of BAFTA-winning playwright Jack Thorne and Oscar-winning composer Stephen Warbeck, which runs at Theatr Clwyd until April 15th – she gets a little emotional.

A co-production between Theatr Clwyd, Bristol Old Vic, Headlong and Rose Theatre Kingston, Junkyard is an honest and witty coming-of-age story about friendship and standing up for what matters, and features a cast of bright young talented actors.

“I’m so proud of this piece, it slightly shakes me up,” admits Tamara, who recently celebrated her first year of programming at the Mold production house. “Junkyard was one of the first scripts I was sent when I got the job. I read it and fell in love with it. It’s like Goodbye Mr Chips but set in Bristol in the 1970s. It’s that inspirational teacher story but with a twist. Any story that has that ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ moment chokes us up because we’ve all had that inspirational teacher or leader.”

REVIEW: Junkyard (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

If the Children's Film Foundation had decided to make a movie of the Bash Street Kids in 1978, Junkyard would undoubtedly be the result. This new musical from the pens of playwright Jack Thorne (writer of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and composer Stephen Warbeck (Oscar-winning musician on Shakespeare in Love) is a raucous, riotous, rambunctious romp through what life was like for kids growing up in and around Bristol in the 1970s.

It's unapologetically in-yer-face, intentionally disruptive and offensive, and perfectly captures that feeling of restless rebellion that all teenagers develop on their journey between childhood and adulthood. Thorne's uncompromising but searingly truthful book weaves a set of characters that at first push you on your back foot, but by the end you find yourself caring about, even wanting to spend more time with.

REVIEW: Skylight (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

David Hare's Skylight debuted 22 years ago, but the socio-political themes the playwright addresses in the text are just as relevant today, if not more so. The two main characters (there is a third, but he is largely peripheral) represent the chasm between the two main attitudes toward society in British life - empathy and apathy.

East End school teacher Kyra is a forthright defender of the underdog, the dispossessed and the disadvantaged. She teaches difficult children in a difficult school in a difficult part of London because she believes she is doing good, that she is improving their lives and so, by association, is making the most of her own.

However, moneyed restaurateur Tom is in denial about how much good Kyra can do, and whether she really means what she says or whether she is holding herself back through some form of self-piteous punishment. Kyra lives in a freezing cold flat in Kensal Rise and seems relatively happy there, insisting that this way of living is really quite normal. Tom refuses to believe that is the case, and pushes Kyra to make more of herself, her intellect and her talents, to apply herself to self-improvement rather than that of others less fortunate than her.

REVIEW: Richard Alston Dance Company Spring 2017 (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

There's a distinct mix of the traditional with the modern in Richard Alston Dance's Spring 2017 tour, which takes the company from the wilds of North Wales to the hubbub of London, via the US, Germany and Yeovil.

Theatr Clwyd is the first stop on a series of performances that take the company through the first six months of the year, and the Mold audience was lucky enough to have a preview of a brand new piece commissioned by Peak Performances, the Office of Arts and Cultural Programming at Montclair State University in New Jersey, before its official premiere on February 2nd in the States.

That piece is Chacony, named after a type of musical composition which reached peak popularity in the 17th century baroque era. Like a pure dance version of Laura Wade's Kreutzer vs Kreutzer (seen at Theatr Clwyd last October), Alston's choreography takes its lead from two pieces of music which are directly interconnected, but quite different. First there's Henry Purcell's Chacony in G minor, then Chacony from 2nd String Quartet Op.36 by Benjamin Britten. Purcell's score is ordered, structured and carefully sequenced, the dancers moving in unison to music reminiscent of a 17th century Viennese masquerade. The polite composition is reflected beautifully by the mannered choreography, the dancers floating around the stage in Peter Todd's diaphanous burgundy outfits as one cohesive group.

Love, Lies and Taxidermy (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

Theatre presented in the round (ie, with the audience encircling the stage, which often has few or no vertical backdrops) is an ingenious way of making those watching a play feel part of the proceedings, or at least closer to them. The "us and them" barrier is removed by having the performance take place just feet (sometimes inches!) away from the audience. You can see the actors' faces clearer, the expressions they make, often even the thoughts running through their minds. It can be a beautifully immersive device to make the experience more memorable to the viewer, and more exhilarating for the performer.

But one drawback of staging in the round is that at some point the performers will have their back to one section of the audience, meaning projection is key to maintaining that shared space relationship. The most common way of tackling this is to have the performers move regularly around the space, changing direction and perspective so as to keep as many plates spinning as possible.