this month's
Ink Pellet contains
A Final Haunt
After 33 extraordinary years, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black will haunt the stage of the Fortune Theatre for the final time, as the production ends in the West End on Saturday 4th March 2023. PW Productions announce that after 33 extraordinary years in London’s West End, the theatrical sensation that is Susan Hill’s THE […]
Reaching for the Moon
Susan Elkin paid a visit to Half Moon theatre in London’s East End to chat with CEO Chris Elwell about their extensive education outreach and innovative theatre programmes. Half Moon Theatre sits in the heart of Limehouse in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, spitting distance from the DLR and mainline station. Formerly a pretty […]
National Youth Theatre Rep Company
The National Youth Theatre’s Rep Company is celebrating its first ten years and Susan Elkin paid a visit to learn more. Each year a group of fifteen or so talented NYT members, aged 18 to 25, are selected by audition to join this company. In just a few months they rehearse three shows, many of […]
Apprenticeships
An important and often overlooked route into the industry, especially for many non-performing roles. Susan Elkin has some suggestions. Theatre is like an iceberg. For every role on stage there are probably at least half a dozen technicians you can’t see. And the industry has been telling us for decades that there are skills shortages […]
School Shows
Never underestimate the power of a school production – for every single person involved. When you meet former students, sometimes from decades back in my case, it’s usually taking part in Oliver! or A Midsummer Night’s Dream that they reminisce about with shining eyes. Most importantly it’s a terrific bonding exercise. We hear a lot […]
New Perspectives
With three separate Lucian Freud exhibitions currently on, Graham Hooper took time to visit and here is his review of these contrasting shows. LLucian Freud would have been 100 this year, and that’s a good excuse to look back over his life and work, but especially his work, as the two have a rather nasty […]
Grandad Anansi – Half Moon Theatre
Predicated partly on Black History Month, Elayne Ogbeta’s muliti-layered play presents Grandad (Marcus Hercules) and his primary school age granddaughter, Abi (Jazmine Wilkinson) in his garden. Like everything else in this show, the garden designed by Sorcha Corcoran, is beautiful with lots of colour, light and plants that Grandad knows by name and talks to. […]
Theatre Review – The King of Nothing – Little Angel Theatre
Ben Glasstone’s charming, witty account of The Emperor Who Has No Clothes works well for two main reasons. First it is one of the most perceptive stories ever written, dealing as it does with vanity, self delusion, conformity and truth. It’s both topical and timeless. Second, we have a cost of living crisis and the […]
Book Review – Activist
by Louisa Reid Published by Guppy Books Cassandra, narrator of this powerful verse novel, is a reluctant sixth former in a prestigious mixed school, formerly all boys, where toxic culture simmers. Driven by her own experience, and by nature a feisty “shouter” she campaigns forcibly for acknowledgement that some of the boys at school treat […]
Book Review – A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers: Reorienting Classroom Literacy Practice
by Maya Pindyck and Ruth Vinz, with Diana Liu and Ashlynn Wittchow The thrust of this detailed, well-researched, quite academic book about the poetry in classrooms is that we shouldn’t teach students to search for meaning so that “the poem becomes a specimen for examination under the microscope of interpretative practices”. Instead we should experience […]
Theatre Reviews
Our theatre reviews aim to bring you the latest and best performances of plays, dance and music. Ink Pellet celebrates the country’s vibrant regional theatres – from performances of the classics and set texts, to new plays that will inspire and support you.
Once again, we have a merry band of discerning teachers who visit plays in their town (sometimes earning themselves a free programme and interval drink)to review for the magazine.
We’ll also review something you might like – just for sheer pleasure! If you would like to join our panel of reviewers, please join in or email the editor john@inkpellet.co.uk.
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It’s good to see a grandiose, gothic musical – not particularly successful by Andrew Lloyd Webber standards when it first aired in 2004 – scaled down and given vibrant new life. It now uses an ensemble cast of three (plus a child) supporting seven principals accompanied by a nine piece band – and it works […]
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These days, stories and story-telling seem more important than ever. Not just for escaping into but for making sense of the times we live in. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is an absolute blueprint of good overcoming evil; a heroic lion battles a white witch in a fantasy land stumbled upon by four […]
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van Placey’s excellent play operates at lots of levels and in different worlds. It’s a topical, intelligent, thoughtful, feminist take on Robert Lewis Stevenson’s novella rather than a dramatisation of it. And it’s rollicking good theatre – frank, uncompromising, fresh and often quite confrontational. In Victorian England, Dr Jekyll’s widow Harriet is dabbling in […]
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Ian McKellen’s Lear is physically and mentally ill from the moment he first appears. He has uncertain, slightly tottery gait. He is in pain and his speech is spat out as if in recovery from a small stoke. It is impeccably observed. So is the capricious mood switching and anger often stressed by the shock […]
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We’re in the Cypress pub as opposed to in Cyprus for this Othello Adapted for Frantic Assembly by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett. It’s a thuggish world of gang warfare, ruthless competing for girls and a great deal of violence with rounders bats and knives around a versatile snooker table. There’s a lot of powerful physical theatre […]
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One turns to Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece novel and adaptations of it for Edwardian nostalgia and that’s what this production delivers in spades. Julian “Downton” Fellowes provides an ungimmicky book and the songs from that talented Half a Sixpence duo, George Styles and Anthony Drewe have terrific fun with a range of song styles from Gilbert […]
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So what is a snark? Of course, Lewis Carroll, at the time of writing, left it for you and me to decide. Later in life he admitted it might be a metaphor for happiness. The four-year-old I chatted to after this excellent adaptation is sure that the snark is a magical bird. Either way Carroll’s […]
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Garsington’s triennial community opera aims to bring in participants and audience who might not usually have anything to do with opera. With an all-age cast of 180 (youngest child on stage appeared to be around a year old), Silver Birch, directed by Karen Gillingham, tells the story of Jack who served in Iraq, all set […]
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It’s a pity therefore that this production of a fine musical doesn’t always feel as sparky as it should. One senses that – the dancers in the wedding scene for instance – are still mentally reading their choreography notes. And far too many performers – Tracy-Ann Oberman as Golde for instance – have been cast […]
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THEATRE Review: Forty Years On Alan Bennett’s first play is set in a traditional boys’ school in 1968 – forty years after the end of the Great War which the retiring change-resenting headmaster (Richard Wilson) remembers very clearly. Bennett explores the tension between that and the changes about to be introduced by the incoming head (Alan […]