North

David Cunningham (North West)

Ever since COVID, the theatre scene has felt a bit off-centre trying to get back to normal. Manchester in 2024 had a swings and roundabouts sort of year. Oldham Coliseum surprised everyone with a Donald Trump-style comeback from oblivion, but Contact gave up on theatrical productions to concentrate on one-night comedy style shows. The city shook off a reputation for rowdy audience behaviour but got dragged into controversy about censorship with a cancelled production.

There were welcome developments. HOME Manchester, The Lowry and Octagon, Bolton put COVID behind them and made great use of their studio facilities.

In terms of mainstream theatre, it has been an underwhelming year. Before they got bogged down in controversy, the Royal Exchange led the way with a sparkling modern-day version of The Importance of Being Earnest and a production of Sweat powerful enough to stir audiences into storming the barricades in the class war.

An imaginative revival of Stones in his Pockets at Octagon, Bolton was the standout comedy for the year.

Dance continued striving to attract audiences unfamiliar with the genre. Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby did a lap of honour, drawing-in fans of the TV show as much as dance enthusiasts. Keith Khan’s The Accountants at Aviva Studios was a lush, sprawling, multimedia epic which confounded the audience by transforming into a stripped-back display of pure dance technique after the interval.

There were spectacular productions such as Disney’s Aladdin, Wicked and Burlesque which were exciting in that they demonstrated Manchester can now attract such razzle dazzle showstoppers. More importantly, the city launched some quality local musicals. There was a full-on, blood-soaked, gonzo production of Lizzie The Musical at Hope Mill. With 42 Balloons, The Lowry managed the rare feat of staging a witty musical where the music and songs were uplifting even if the ending was a bit of a downer.

If the mainstream was humdrum, the fringe was in rare form. American Buffalo was an undeniable "you should have been there" show, a rare chance to see a high-quality production in an intimate setting. It did, however, feel like a mainstream show had taken a wrong turn and ended up on the fringe.

More in spirit with the fringe concept of achieving wonders on a shoestring budget, Ian Townsend’s Other Lives showed what could be achieved with minimal resources but a talented cast and a first-rate script. The young company Dare to Know Theatre continued an unbroken run of excellence with Jake Talbot’s Broken Boys. Red Brick Theatre provided a pair of outstanding shows with Bad Moult and A Number.

The GM Fringe Festival had a number of surprises. A highlight was ETAL Theatre’s audacious version of Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water). The Halcyon Room’s Black Spring and Antimatter Productions' Maybe We’re Both Abandoned respectively brought horror and science fiction to the fringe—genres which are notoriously hard to stage successfully even with a mainstream budget.

The most surprising event of the year was personal, not theatrical. A work colleague of mine was having a drink with a friend of his named Tommy, who remarked he was at liberty that evening as his wife was at the theatre. My colleague said he worked with a bloke called David Cunningham who wrote about the theatre, and Tommy responded that fifty years ago, he and I were best friends, although the friendship lapsed when I moved from Lower Broughton. So there you go—the BTG not only offers news and reviews on the theatre but the chance to reignite lapsed friendships.

Dora Frankel (North East, dance specialist)

Dance Picks of 2024

It’s been a mixed year as always, but some shows just shone out, although others had real highlights but were more uneven. If you think differently it’d be great to know…

  1. Top of the list is Northern Ballet’s superb realisation of Romeo and Juliet, devised by Christopher Gable CBE, choreographed by Massimo Moricone and restaged, mainly, by Daniel de Andrade. The superb music by Prokofiev and wonderful choreography, which seamlessly utilises classical ballet and contemporary, is a winner: lot of shifts, action, swordfights and tears.
  2. Scottish Dance Theatre’s perfectly formed double bill, The Flock and Moving Cloud, was performed at Dance City, where it looked perfect. Flock was particularly strong, moving, clean and beautifully danced and full of vibrance, joy and humanity.
  3. Northern Ballet’s A Christmas Carol is another Gable / Moricone collaboration, which looks incredibly fresh still after 30 years and is dramaturgically spot on. I saw the show at the Grand Theatre Leeds, and it was packed out. Again, not just a classical ballet; it has songs, folk dances, great costumes and, of course, the comic and pantomimic Fezziwig parents, bringing laughs.
  4. The Monocle by Rendez-Vous Dance, intense, powerful and queer, it was so well suited to Stage Two, Northern Stage. I particularly liked Imogen Banks, the charismatic jazz singer.
  5. Fertile Ground, with the fluid and meaningful double bill Play, Pause, Repeat. This company platforms some of the finest contemporary dancers in the North East and deserves more recognition.

An honorary mention for the unique Thick & Tight, with their slightly bizarre, but undeniably radical, queer and fun Tits & Teeth. It’d be great to see them back in 2025.

Mark Love-Smith (Yorkshire)

It's A Motherf**king Pleasure

New company FlawBored presented a small-scale debut piece which memorably unpicked anxieties and mores around disability in the arts and culture, with a vicious sense of humour. "It sets up quandaries and logical contradictions breezily and with great skill."

Blue Beard

Emma Rice's Wise Children goes from strength to strength. Another powerful ensemble show with again another fantastic performance from Katy Owen, blending comedy with trenchant commentary. "They’re still childishly, gloriously playful. But there is also wisdom to them—and, here, a new note: anger."

A Raisin in the Sun

Director Tinuke Craig returned to Leeds Playhouse with a strongly performed, superbly well-directed rendition of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play: an "intricate, intimate and impactful drama without showiness."

The Talent

A remarkable one-woman show from Action Hero, featuring a compelling and effortlessly bravura performance from Gemma Paintin. The piece sees her running through fractured snippets of speech, perfectly capturing the intonations and phrasings of safety announcements, podcasts, advertising, video games and all the audio detritus of modern life. Though Paintin remained in a vocal booth throughout, isolated from the audience—perhaps from humanity as a whole—it was a captivating performance. Eerie and evocative.

The Frogs

Sadly, we didn’t seem to have reviewed this one either, but this Spymonkey show was my standout favourite of the year. It saw Aitor Basauri and Toby Park grappling with the reduction of their company to two, with a modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ satire. They infused the piece with the daftest comedy and clowning, as well as, more surprisingly, some deeply moving meditations on grief and loss of various kinds. That both of these modes coexisted and complemented each other so perfectly was testament to the skill and craft of this now quarter-century-old company.

Bubbling under this year:

David Chadderton (North West)

Despite its various troubles that are bound to have damaged its reputation amongst audiences and people who work in the industry, the Royal Exchange had some very good offerings this year.

Two of these were Bruntwood Prize winners—Shed: Exploded View by Phoebe Eclair-Powell and Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz by Nathan Queeley-Dennis—and both were given excellent productions that were well worth seeing, though while the first had a full run in the main house, the second only appeared at the theatre that founded the competition that it won for four midweek performances.

Other productions worth catching at this theatre were the revival of Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and the Christmas musical production, Spend Spend Spend by Steve Brown and Justin Greene.

The Octagon in Bolton again featured several literary adaptations in its programme, but for me, the highlights were its revivals of Stones in his Pockets by Marie Jones and Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s musical Little Shop of Horrors, both co-productions of classic shows given very entertaining revivals.

I saw two new Emma Rice productions for Wise Children in 2024. Her adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, a co-production with the RSC, worked well in the Swan at Stratford, but Blue Beard, which I saw at HOME Manchester, was stunning and was classic Rice in top form.

I’ve seen some very poor stage transfers of old sitcoms I used to like, so I was wary about the touring Drop the Dead Donkey adaptation, despite featuring all of the surviving members of the original cast, but I needn’t have worried; the characters were as we remembered them but had moved on convincingly, the hit rate of gags was as high over two hours of stage time as it had been over the half-hour TV format and the satire was just as sharp and up-to-the-minute.

I managed to get to Edinburgh for a brief stay in August, looking a short bus ride out of town to find affordable accommodation—a 2025 visit is unlikely as the Oasis gig in town during the Fringe has pushed the already extortionate cost of accommodation even higher, and made it harder to find any—but I found some shows that were worth the trip.

It was a privilege to get the chance to see again Jonny Donahoe in Duncan Macmillan’s funny and moving Every Brilliant Thing, a show still stuck firmly in my mind as an all-time Edinburgh highlight from ten years earlier. Poet Elvis McGonagall never disappoints with his hilarious, unsubtly satirical observations on life, and his latest show, Gin & Catatonic saw him still on top form.

Former BTG reviewer Richard Vergette’s Born in the USA, a retitled and reworked version of his Leaving Vietnam, was powerful and still very relevant, and The Last Laugh by Paul Hendy brought together a terrific cast to resurrect three well-loved British comedy performers.

But I think the production that really stood out for me over the whole of 2024 was director David Thacker’s revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo at the Kings Arms in Salford with a dream cast of locally based actors. With a run of just two weeks in a venue that could only accommodate maybe a couple of dozen audience members at a time, being one of them really felt like being part of something special.