Busy NW theatre week; theatre 'discoveries' that became big; great shows that disappeared; new podcast episode: Dark Noon from fix+foxy at Aviva Studios
News, reviews, features and podcast on theatre across the UK
The British Theatre Guide Newsletter
No 1146: 11 February 2024
Editorial
I reviewed my first show of the year in Bolton this week (I have been to the theatre once before this year, but as a paying customer), but that was just a warm-up before things really start to get going for the post-Christmas seasons. I have seven press night invitations for three consecutive nights next week in Manchester and Liverpool—all being well, we will be covering six of them between two of us.
For his feature this week, Philip is returning to a subject he first wrote about in October, looking back to when, as theatregoers, we have ‘discovered’ shows, writers or performers who later go on to much bigger things. This week, he has focussed on one of the more extreme examples of this: someone he interviewed for the BTG podcast back in 2013 who was performing on the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time with a little show that started as a ten-minute stand-up piece in London six months earlier called Fleabag.
That piece went on to become a West End show and an internationally renowned TV series, and its creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, has appeared in a Raiders of the Lost Ark sequel and written for James Bond.
That same podcast episode, still one of our most downloaded, also featured me talking to Howard Read, whom we first came across with his combined stand-up and animation show in a tiny attic room at The Pleasance in Edinburgh. By the time of this interview, he had created three TV series based on his stage show for CBBC and was contracted to write for another animated show which, as he says at the end, he couldn’t tell me about until I turned off the mic. So I did, and was as excited as he was—it was Danger Mouse. He has since written dialogue for Cookie Monster, another of my childhood heroes, in The Furchester Hotel and for Horrible Histories.
But there are other shows and performers that we loved but which quietly disappeared without trace. What of them? We still quote to one another in our house lines from Arthur Riordan’s brilliant manic verse play/musical Improbably Frequency, which we saw twice in Edinburgh in 2006 (and I wasn’t reviewing, so both times paid Traverse prices)—“some of us were born to be spies”; “Infiltrated by British intelligence, / Oxymoronic as well as a sin”; and we’ve since become “cruciverbalists”. It was a spy romance set in Ireland that had in its cast of characters John Betjeman, Flann O’Brien and Erwin Schrödinger, which I’d love to see revived.
We didn’t go to Edinburgh last year after the cost of accommodation the year before, but our reviewer Tony Trigwell-Jones gave five stars to a show called Dark Noon from Danish theatre company fix+foxy retelling the history of America from a different point of view from the Wild West myth, with a cast of seven South African actors.
This is to be revived next month at Aviva Studios in Manchester, and I got to speak to its co-directors, Tue Biering and Nhlanhla Mahlangu, about what the show is about and how it was created for the latest episode of the BTG podcast.
So happy Lunar New Year, especially to all the dragons out there, and I’ll back in your inbox at the end of a busy theatregoing week.
It is always fun to spot a star long before they become famous. In the first of the series, Philip Fisher remembers seeing Phoebe Waller-Bridge before she became a household name.
New-writing company Fifth Word is looking for young Muslim women and girls living in Nottingham for a project that will accompany a production on a national tour.
The Merchant of Venice 1936 (Trafalgar Theatre Productions and Eilene Davidson Productions in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company) - Criterion Theatre, London, –
