James Sheldon’s Mr Darcy and Rosa Hesmondhalgh’s Lizzy Bennet in Pride And Prejudice. Picture: Pamela Raith
AT the home of Britain’s most performed living playwright, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Pride And Prejudice is presented in a transatlantic adaptation by Kate Hamill, his equivalent in the United States, although the New York writer and actress is not a familiar name over here.
Directed in its UK premiere by Octagon Theatre Bolton artistic director Lotte Wakeham in a co-production with the SJT, Hull Truck Theatre and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, Jane Austen’s early 19th century love story remains wholly English in character on stage but shot through with modern sensibilities.
“I take a new play approach to adaptations,” Hamill says in her programme note, eschewing doing “just a copy-and-paste version” in favour of conducting a conversation with the original. “I really treat it as a collaboration between myself and the original author.”
She noted their shared interests: the humour and social smartness; Austen’s proto-feminism; “how the dictates of our conscience clash with what society expects of us”.
Hamill vowed to tell Pride & Prejudice in a totally new way, drawing on her love of irreverent theatrical shows for a play that would interest Austen advocates and new audiences alike and be fresh and surprising, even for those who know the novel (or indeed the multitude of past stage, film and TV adaptations).
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as a farce before,” she writes, presumably having not seen the rollicking, risqué, irreverent romp Pride And Prejudice * (* Sort Of), Isobel McArthur’s at once faithful yet anarchic Olivier Award winner that toured York Theatre Royal last November.
“Even now, and certainly in Jane Austen’s day, we treat love like a mix between a game and a war – down to tactics and strategies,” writes Hamill. “So I wanted a play structure that’s very high stakes, and halfway between a game and a war, and I thought, that’s a farce.”
So, may the farce be with you, but farce underpinned by a desire to score serious points about our need to make the perfect match in life, refracted through a feminist lens.
The tone is too shrill in Act One, where Joanne Holden’s diminutive match-making Mrs Bennet overplays her hand, too dominant, chomping at the bit too much to be comical in the mother’s desperation.
Comedy has to wear the ring of truth but it was cast aside here. Instead, this caricature stood out for the wrong reasons, like her black shoes on press night (incongruous but excused by the need to protect a broken bone).
Compare and contrast her gurning with taciturn, preoccupied husband Mr Bennet, the towering Dyfrig Morris feeding off scraps but to far more telling effect. He would go on to be even more subversively humorous as the veiled Miss Anne de Bourgh.
Less is more in Eve Pereira’s Mr Bingley and Aamira Challenger’s Jane Bennet, although that mantra is neglected by Ben Fensome’s oleaginous Mr Collins but with scene-stealing brio. Jessica Ellis hits the bottle as Lydia Bennet, then hits the satirical bullseye as the outrageous snob Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Minimalist staging by designer Louie Whitemore gives a fizz to proceedings, conducted with costume changes on stage and cast members moving furniture with alacrity.
Those costumes must do the heavy lifting in evoking the Regency era with its whirl of society balls, urgent young women and awkward, tongue-tied men.
All the while, musical director Sonum Batra’s string arrangements of Blur’s Country House, The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me, The La’s There She Goes, The Pussycat Dolls’ Don’t Cha and more pop nuggets besides add to the playful air, but it is not until Act Two that Hamill’s Austen re-fit hits the right note consistently.
Rosa Hesmondhalgh’s astute, assiduous Lizzy Bennet had been swimming against the tide of caricature from the start and now she moves centre stage in tandem with James Sheldon’s Mr Darcy. Unlike those around them, their characters have the chance to grow as their romance does likewise.
Hesmondhalgh’s plain-speaking Lizzy becomes ever bolder, resolute in her beliefs yet malleable in ultimate action. Sheldon’s Darcy gradually sheds his insufferably priggish skin, his performance always alive to the comedy in the pricking of his balloon of pride and pomposity as he swells with uncontrollable love in the rain.
Romance eventually wins out in Hamill’s Pride And Prejudice, but comedy holds the upper hand in the tone of Wakeham’s direction as much as in Hamill’s dialogue. From the helter-skelter first half, they deliver a belter of a second half.
Octagon Theatre Bolton, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, Hull Truck Theatre and Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in association with Theatr Clwyd, present Pride & Prejudice, Stephen Joseph Theatre, until July 26, 7.30pm, plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.Hull Truck Theatre, September 18 to October 11; 01482 323638 or hulltruck.co.uk.
Amelia Donkor and Antony Jardine: Playing Gulie Harlock and Seebohm Rowntree respectively alongside 100-strong community ensemble in His Last Report at York Theatre Royal. Picture: Millie Stephens
YORK Theatre Royal’s community play takes top billing in Charles Hutchinson’s selections for summer satisfaction.
Community play of the week: York Theatre Royal and Riding Lights Theatre Company present His Last Report, York Theatre Royal, today to August 3
FOCUSING on pioneering York social reformer Seebohm Rowntree and his groundbreaking investigation into the harsh realities of poverty, Misha Duncan-Barry and Bridget Foreman’s play will be told through the voices of York’s residents, past and present.
Seebohm’s findings illuminate the struggles of the working class, laying the foundation for the welfare state and sparking a movement that will redefine life as we know it. However, when fast forwarding to present-day York, what is Seebohm’s real legacy as the Ministry begins to dismantle the very structures he championed in His Last Report’s York story with a national impact? Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Bean there, done that: “Appetite For Destruction” artist Lincoln Lightfoot takes his spay can to York’s iconic Bile Beans mural advert at VandalFest
Street art takeover of the summer: Vandals At Work present VandalFest, today, Sunday, then July 25 to 27, 11am to 6pm
VANDALS At Work reunite with youth homelessness charity Safe and Sound Homes (SASH) for VandalFest, the immersive street art takeover of a disused office block with a 2025 theme of the playful, cheeky, witty and mischievous.
Among more than 30 artists from the UK and beyond are Bristol graffiti pioneer Inkie, subversive stencilist Dotmasters, inflatable prankster Filthy Luker, master of optical illusions Chu, rooftop renegade Rowdy and York’s own Sharon McDonagh, Lincoln Lightfoot and Boxxhead. Entry is free, with a suggested £3 donation to SASH.
Craig David: In party mood at Scarborough Open Air Theatre today
Coastal gigs of the week: TK Maxx Presents Scarborough Open Air Theatre, Craig David TS5 Show plus special guest Patrick Nazemi, today; Judas Priest, July 23. Gates open at 6pm
SOUTHAMPTON rhythm & blues musician Craig David parades his triple threat as singer, MC and DJ at his TS5 party night – patented at his Miami penthouse – on the East Coast this weekend. On the 25th anniversary of debut album Born To Do It, expect a set combining old skool anthems from R&B to Swing Beat, Garage to Bashment, while merging chart-topping House hits too.
Judas Priest, formed in Birmingham in 1969, are still receiving a Grammy nomination in 2025 for Best Metal Performance, on top of being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, appointed by shock rocker Alice Cooper, in 2022. Their 19th studio album, Invincible Shield, was released in March 2024. Wednesday’s support act will be Phil Campbell & The B**stard Sons. Box office: scarboroughopenairtheatre.com.
Heather Leech in Gleowit Productions’ King Harold’s Mother at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre
Historical solo show of the week: Gleowit Productions in King Harold’s Mother, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tonight, 7.30pm
IN 1066, a mother loses four sons; three killed at the Battle of Hastings, one branded as a traitor. However, these are times of turmoil, where crowns on the head go with swords in the hand, and this mother has lost everything.
Two years later in Exeter, King Harold’s mother, Gytha Thorkelsdottir, makes her last stand against the might of the new king, William. She is forced to face the consequences of her own actions, to accept the overwhelming might of the Conqueror. Is nothing all she is left with? Is nothing better than this, asks Gleowit Productions in King Harold’s Mother, written and performed by Heather Leech. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.
Dame Harriet Walter: Pride And Prejudice celebration at Wesley Centre, Malton
Ryedale Festival theatre event of the week: Pride And Prejudice, Dame Harriet Walter, Melvyn Tan and Madeleine Easton, Wesley Centre, Malton, Sunday, 7pm
THIS theatrical retelling of Pride And Prejudice by novelist and Austen biographer Gill Hornby marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Star of stage and screen Dame Harriet Walter brings the romance of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to life in an intimate drawing-room setting, in much the same way that Jane herself first read the story aloud to family and friends.
Carl David’s score for the 1995 BBC television adaptation will be performed by pianist Melvyn Tan and violinist Madeleine Easton. The festival runs until July 27; full details and tickets at ryedalefestival.com. Box office: 01751 475777.
The Wedding Present’s David Gedge, left, and Reception writer-director Matt Aston, pictured walking through Leeds, will be teaming up for a chat at Bluebird Bakery, Acomb, on Sunday
Gig and chat show the week: An Evening of Conversation and Music with David Gedge from The Wedding Present, Rise@Bluebird Bakery, Acomb Road, Acomb, York, Sunday, 8pm, doors 7pm
DAVID Gedge, long-time leader of The Wedding Present, discusses his “semi-legendary” Leeds indie band’s 40-year-career and his life in the music industry, in conversation with Amanda Cook. York writer/director Matt Aston joins him too on the eve of rehearsals for Reception – The Wedding Present Musical, ahead of its premiere at Slung Low, The Warehouse, Holbeck, Leeds, from August 22 to September 6.
Sunday’s event concludes with Gedge’s 20-minute acoustic set drawn from The Wedding Present’s cornucopia of arch, romantic yet perennially disappointed songs of love, life’s high hopes and woes, chance and no chance. Box office: eventbrite.com.
Listen to David Gedge discuss 40 years Of The Wedding Present, the Reception musical and his Rise@Bluebird Bakery show with Two Big Egos In A Small Car podcasters Charles Hutchinson and Graham Chalmers at:
Out with the old, in with New: Harvey Stevens’ Jamie, front left, with his Sheffield school classmates in Pick Me Up Theatre’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie
Musical of the week: Pick Me Up Theatre in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, July 22 to 26, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Saturday matinee
AT 16, Sheffield schoolboy Jamie New is terrified of the future and has no interest in pursuing a traditional career. He wants to be a drag queen. He knows he can be a sensation. Supported by his loving mum and encouraged by friends, can Jamie overcome prejudice, beat the bullies and step out of the darkness, into the spotlight?
Written by Tom MacRae and The Feeling’s Dan Gillespie Sells, this joyous underdog story is staged by York company Pick Me Up Theatre with Harvey Stevens, 15, and Gemma McDonald leading the cast. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.
The poster for Steve Steinman’s Love Hurts, Power Ballads & Anthems!, on tour at the Grand Opera House, York
Jukebox show of the week: Steve Steinman’s Love Hurts, Power Ballads & Anthems!, Grand Opera House, York, July 24, 7.30pm
FROM the producers of Anything For Love and Vampires Rock comes the latest Steve Steinman venture, this one built around power ballads and anthems performed by a powerhouse cast of singers and a seven-piece band.
Love Hurts embraces Fleetwood Mac, Heart, Whitesnake, Billy Idol, Aerosmith, Tina Turner, Cutting Crew, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, Rainbow, Van Halen, Europe, Air Supply and more. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor: On course for Knavesmire
Dancefloor double bill of the week: Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Natasha Bedingfield, York Racecourse Music Showcase Weekend, July 25.Gates, 4pm; first race, 5.30pm; last race, 8.23pm
AT the only evening meeting of the Knavesmire racing calendar, kitchen disco queen Sophie Ellis-Bextor and fellow Londoner Natasha Bedingfield each play a set after the seven-race sporting action.
Ellis-Bextor, 46, will draw on her five top ten albums and eight top ten singles, such as Murder On The Dancefloor and Take Me Home, from a pop career now stretching beyond 25 years. Bedingfield , 43, has the hits Unwritten, Single, These Words, I Wanna Have Your Babies and Soulmate to her name. For race-day tickets, go to: yorkracecourse.co.uk.
Dr Adam Parker, curator of archaeology at York Museums Trust, holding the Thor’s Hammer Pendant at the Viking North exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum, York
VIKING treasures, street art indoors, Fringe comedy previews and Ryedale Festival’s Austen celebration bring out the summer smiles in Charles Hutchinson.
Museum launch of the week: Viking North, Yorkshire Museum, York
VIKING North is filled with magnificent objects, many unseen for generations and others that have never been on public display, adding up to “the best collection of Viking finds to be shown outside London” as these Viking treasures reveal the North’s power base, wealth and skills.
Telling the story of the Viking Age in the North of England from AD866 to 1066, the exhibition is underpinned by new archaeological research and cutting-edge technology and features objects from Yorkshire Museum’s own collection, the Vale of York hoard, co-owned with the British Museum, and specially loaned national and regional items, including from the Viking Army Camp at Aldwark, North Yorkshire.
Sea, Swell, Scribe: Jo Walton, Ruth King and Nicky Kippax combine in Pyramid Gallery’s exhibition of paintings, pottery and poetry
Exhibition of the week: Sea, Swell, Scribe, Jo Walton, Ruth King and Nicky Kippax, Pyramid Gallery, Stonegate, York, until August 31, open 10am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday
WHAT happens when you let a poet loose in an art gallery with a piece of charcoal? If the juxtaposition of sumptuous curvy and pointy pots against a backdrop of textured metallic atmospheric paintings is inspiring her, then she will scribble words and phrases all over the plinths
York artist Jo Walton, from Rogues Atelier, potter Ruth King, from the Craft Potters Association, and poet Nicky Kippax, from Bluebird Bakery, combine in a show planned and organised by Pyramid gallery manager Fiona Macfarlane and curated by Walton. Kippax has written Eksphratic verse in response to the paintings and pots.
Street artist Al Murphy in his Naughty Corner at VandalFest at 2, Low Ousegate, York
Street art takeover of the summer: Vandals At Work present VandalFest, 2, Low Ousegate, York, Friday to Sunday, then July 25 to 27, 11am to 6pm
VANDALS At Work reunite with youth homelessness charity Safe and Sound Homes (SASH) for VandalFest, the immersive street art takeover of a disused office block at 2 Low Ousegate, York, with a 2025 theme of the playful, cheeky, witty and mischievous.
The stripped-out interior provides four floors of blank canvas for bold, site-specific “intervention” that cover walls, floors and ceilings, complemented by live DJ sets. Among more than 30 artists from the UK and beyond are Bristol graffiti pioneer Inkie, subversive stencilist Dotmasters, inflatable prankster Filthy Luker, master of optical illusions Chu, rooftop renegade Rowdy and York’s own Sharon McDonagh, Lincoln Lightfoot and Boxxhead. Entry is free, with a suggested £3 donation to SASH.
Dame Harriet Walter: Pride And Prejudice celebration at Wesley Centre, Malton
Ryedale Festival theatre event of the week: Pride And Prejudice, Dame Harriet Walter, Melvyn Tan and Madeleine Easton, Wesley Centre, Malton, Sunday, 7pm
THIS theatrical retelling of Pride And Prejudice by novelist and Austen biographer Gill Hornby marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Star of stage and screen Dame Harriet Walter brings the romance of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to life in an intimate drawing-room setting, in much the same way that Jane herself first read the story aloud to family and friends.
Carl David’s score for the 1995 BBC television adaptation will be performed by pianist Melvyn Tan and violinist Madeleine Easton. The festival runs until July 27; full details and tickets at ryedalefestival.com. Box office: 01751 475777.
Rob Auton: Barmby Moor comedian previews his Edinburgh Fringe show, CAN: The Story Of A Man Called CAN, at Theatre@41, Monkgate, York
Comedy event of the week: Halfway To Edinburgh, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, until Saturday
IN a week of Edinburgh Fringe previews and comedy nights, Nina Gilligan discusses memory loss, health anxiety and goldfish-related trauma in Goldfish tonight (8pm) and Hayley Ellis navigates middle age in Silly Mare (Work in Progress) tomorrow (8pm).
Susan Riddell and Kate Dolan, on Friday (7.30pm), and Barmby Moor surrealist Rob Auton and Chloe Petts, on Saturday (7.30pm), round off the festival tasters. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Georgi Mottram: Classical BRIT Award nominee performing at Voices United concert in aid of St Leonard’s Hospice
Charity event of the week: Ian Stroughair presents Voices United: Rubies For Our Angel, Grand Opera House, York, Friday, 7.30pm
YORK cabaret artiste and West End musical actor Ian Stroughair co-hosts this fundraiser to mark St Leonard’s Hospice’s 40th anniversary with radio presenters Joanita Musisi and Laura Castle, introducing a night of musical theatre and rock and pop classics.
On the bill will be Stroughair in Velma Celli drag diva regalia; York singer Jessica Steel and guitarist Stuart Allan; York musical theatre actress Joanne Theaker; retro party band Jonny And The Dunebugs; The Voice UK 2024 semi-finalist Lois Morgan Gay and West End classical singer Georgi Mottram. Box office: https://shorturl.at/G3qhV or atgtickets.com/york.
Strictly between us: Anton du Beke and Giovanni Pernice team up for Together Again at York Barbican
Dance show of the week: Anton Du Beke and Giovanni Pernice in Together Again, York Barbican, Friday, 7.30pm
STRICTLY Come Dancing alumni Anton Du Beke and Giovanni Pernice promise “more fun, more dance, more song and even more entertainment than ever before” in the terpsichorean double act’s new show Together Again, full of breathtaking routines, stunning choreography and a seamless blend of Ballroom, Latin and musical theatre. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Craig David: In party mood at Scarborough Open Air Theatre this weekend
Coastal gig of the week: Craig David TS5 Show, Scarborough Open Air Theatre, Saturday; gates open at 6pm
SOUTHAMPTON rhythm & blues musician Craig David parades his triple threat as singer, MC and DJ at his TS5 party night, patented at his Miami penthouse. On the 25th anniversary of debut album Born To Do It, expect a set combining old-skool anthems from R&B to Swing Beat, Garage to Bashment, while merging chart-topping House hits too. Box office: scarboroughopenairtheatre.com.
Amelia Donkor and Antony Jardine: Playing Gulie Harlock and Seebohm Rowntree respectively alongside 100-strong community ensemble in His Last Report at York Theatre Royal. Picture: Millie Stephens
Community play of the week: His Last Report, York Theatre Royal, Saturday to August 3
FOCUSING on pioneering York social reformer Seebohm Rowntree and his groundbreaking investigation into the harsh realities of poverty, Misha Duncan-Barry and Bridget Foreman’s play will be told through the voices of York’s residents, past and present.
Seebohm’s findings illuminate the struggles of the working class, laying the foundation for the welfare state and sparking a movement that will redefine life as we know it. However, when fast forwarding to present-day York, what is Seebohm’s real legacy as the Ministry begins to dismantle the very structures he championed in His Last Report’s York story with a national impact? Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
In Focus: Clap Trap Theatre in Pennyroyal, Helmsley Arts Centre, July 19 & 20, 7.30pm
Florrie Stockbridge’s Daphne, left, and Natasha Jones’s Christine in Clap Trap Theatre’s Pennyroyal
HELMSLEY Arts Centre artistic director Natasha Jones and musical partner Florrie Stockbridge take to the stage this weekend in Clap Trap Theatre’s production of Lucy Roslyn’s Pennyroyal.
Premiered in 2022 at the Finborough Theatre, London, this heartrending play about sisterhood and motherhood, enduring love and regrets many years in the making explores the things expected of women and what happens if life does not go to plan.
When Daphne (played by Stockbridge) is diagnosed with Premature Ovarian Insufficiency at 19, her sister Christine (Jones) steps in to help in the only way she knows how: by donating her eggs. For a while, the world seems corrected. However, as the years go by – and Daphne sets out on the long road of IVF – the sisters’ relationship begins to twist.
“I think of my body sometimes like it’s stubborn,” says Daphne. “We’re not good friends. Like it’s a spooky hotel, and I’m just a ghost haunting it. ’Cause you don’t live in a hotel, you just pass through.”
Pennyroyal is inspired by Edith Wharton’s 1922 novella The Old Maid, a 1922 novella adapted ten years later into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Zoe Akins. One hundred years on, the story is re-imagined by Roslyn, an award-winning Camden Town performer and writer.
Her most recent work includes Orlando, a previous collaboration with director Josh Roche and Jessie Anand Productions that won the Origins Award at VAULT Festival before transferring to the Pleasance, Edinburgh.
Other work includes Showmanship (Theatre503) and Goody (Pleasance, Edinburgh and Greenwich Theatre – Les Enfants Terribles’ Greenwich Partnership Award 2017). Her debut, The State vs. John Hayes, started life at the Edinburgh Fringe, before touring to Theatre Royal Bath, The Lowry, Salford, the King’s Head Theatre, London, and OSH Brooklyn, New York.
Jones and Stockbridge have received directing and production support from Libby Pearson. Roslyn’s 80-minute play contains strong language and discussion of infertility and domestic violence. Box office: 01439 771700or helmsleyarts.co.uk.
Sisters doing it for themselves? Jennifer Jones’s Elizabeth Watson, left, Livy Potter’s Emma Watson and Florence Poskitt’s Margaret Watson in Black Treacle Theatre’s The Watsons. Picture: Dave Lee
WHEN studying semiotics and semantics in year three of Cardiff University’s English Literature degree more than 40 years ago, one discussion point was ‘Who’s in control of a novel’. The writer? The characters? Or the reader?
Roll forward to York company Black Treacle Theatre’s York premiere of The Watsons, where writer Laura Wade and indeed the characters ask that same question. The reader is replaced by audience members, whose control here is whether to laugh or not at Wade’s ever more anxious comedy.
The question is heightened by the playwright’s challenge. Wade penned Posh (the Royal Court one about the Oxford University dining club of Cameron and BoJo notoriety) and Home, I’m Darling (the darkly comic one about sex, cake and the quest to be the perfect 1950s’Welwyn Garden City housewife): two social studies of English behaviour. The Watsons is a third such study, but with a difference.
Not a fan: Victoria Delaney’s oft-disapproving Lady Osborne. Picture: Dave Lee
Wade picks up the unfinished business of a Jane Austen novel with all the familiar tropes of young sisters desperately having to seek husbands as the only way to improve their circumstances from a pool of unsuitable cads and awkward aristocrats, but with one sister demanding to do it on her own terms. For Pride And Prejudice’s Lizzy Bennet, read The Watsons’ Emma Watson (Livy Potter).
Emma is 19, new in town in 19th century English society, but promptly cut off by her rich aunt and consigned back to the family home with her sisters, the more earnest Elizabeth (Jennifer Jones) and ever excitable Margaret (Florence Poskitt).
Into Austen’s whirl spin the irresistible cad, Nick Patrick Jones’s Tom Musgrave, the tongue-tied toff, Cameron O’Byrne’s Lord Osborne, and his grandstanding mother, Victoria Delaney’s Lady Osborne, with daughter Miss Osborne (Effie Warboys) in tow. A vicar is on the marital march too, Andrew Roberts’s awfully nice Mr Howard.
Livy Potter’s 19th century Emma Watson looks startled as Sanna Jeppsson’s Laura uses her 21st century phone in The Watsons. Picture: Dave Lee
So far, so Austen, if Austen mini, and then…enter Laura (Sanna Jeppsson in her stage return after time out for yoga-teaching studies). Laura, wearing period costume when first seeking to fit in, turns out to be Laura Wade, wading in to explain that Austen’s story went no further (beyond notes to her sister containing advice on who Emma should not marry).
What happens when the writer loses the plot? Jeppsson’s Laura takes over, but it is not as straightforward as that. She does not merely grab Austen’s reins and gallop to the finishing line as the affairs of their heart play out. Instead, The Watsons becomes a piece of meta-theatre, exploring the role, the motives and the creative process of a writer, who, spoiler alert, ends up losing the plot herself.
What’s more, Laura will not have it all her own way. Potter’s feisty Emma speculates: what if she decides what she wants to do, rather than going along with Laura’s plotlines. Trouble is brewing, trouble accentuated by Emma’s fellow abandoned Austen characters rebelling too. Time for a breather, plenty to discuss.
Livy Potter’s Emma Watson puts Andrew Roberts’s clergyman, Mr Howard, to use carrying parcels in The Watsons. Picture: Dave Lee
Re-enter Jeppsson’s Laura, mobile phone in pocket and by now wearing jeans. Re-enter Austen’s increasingly errant characters as The Watsons heads ever further off-piste.
Not everything works – after all, this a reactivated novel in progress with room for trial and error – and you will not be surprised when Jeppsson’s Laura has an exhausted, exasperated meltdown, but you will surely love the characters’ philosophical discussions on Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, led by Matt Pattison’s scene-stealing Robert Watson.
What begins as stilted Regency period drama becomes free-form modern theatre of the absurd, mischievous yet smart, like the works of Austentatious, wherein Wade examines the art of storytelling, the right to free will and who has the final say on our finales.
Cry havoc: Effie Warboys’ Miss Osborne, centre, leads the battle charge in Black Treacle Theatre’s The Watsons. Picture: Dave Lee
Under Jim Paterson’s playful yet still sincere direction, The Watsons keeps the surprises coming, the energy dynamic, the intellect busy and the humour unpredictable. All the while, Jeppsson’s vexed Laura is the serious one, coming up with a theory to Potter’s Emma as to why Austen put the pen down on her.
Amid the social commentary, the parallels with today’s values, the ever dafter comedy, this union of writer, character and audience hits its peak.
Black Treacle Theatre in The Watsons, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tonight, 7.30pm; tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: York, 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.
Olly Murs: Returning to familiar turf at York Racecourse’s first Summer Music Saturday meeting this afternoon
AS the outdoor concert season awakens, a festival goes to heaven and hell and a koala tries something new in Charles Hutchinson’s list for the upcoming week.
Back on track: Olly Murs, York Racecourse, Summer Music Saturday, today, first race at 1.55pm; last race, 5.25pm, followed by concert
ESSEX singer, songwriter, actor and television personality from Olly Murs completes his hat-trick of appearances at York Racecourse this weekend, having played the Knavesmire track in 2010 and 2017.
Performing after today’s race card, his set list will draw on his seven albums and 25 singles, including the number ones Please Don’t Let Me Go, Heart Skips A Beat, Dance With Me Tonight and Troublemaker. Race day tickets: yorkracecourse.co.uk.
Marcelo Nisinman: Argentinean bandoneon player, performing Martin Palmeri’s Misatango at York Guildhall today
Reverence and rhythm of the week: Prima Choral Artists presents Scared Rhythms: From Chant To Tango, York Guildhall, The Courtyard, Coney Street, York, tonight, 7.30pm
ARGENTINEAN bandoneon maestro and composer Marcelo Nisinman performs Martin Palmeri’s Misatango as the finale to director Eve Lorian’s Sacred Rhythms – From Chant To Tango concert.
He joins the 60-strong Prima Choral Artists choir, pianist Greg Birch, Yorkshire mezzo-soprano soloist Lucy Jubb and the New World String Quintet for tonight’s journey through sacred and spiritual choral music. Box office: primachoral.com.
Justin Moorhouse: Giving two of the greatest performances of his life at Pocklington Arts Centre this weekend
Comedy gigs of the week: Justin Moorhouse, The Greatest Performance Of My Life, Pocklington Arts Centre, today, 3pm and 8pm
ASHTON-UNDER-LYNE comedian, radio presenter and actor Justin Moorhouse covers subjects ranging from pantomimes to dreams, how to behave in hospitals, small talk, realising his mum is a northern version of Columbo, and how being a smart-mouthed child saved him from a life of continually being beaten up. Funny, interesting, perhaps it will warm the soul too. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
Bluebird Bakery: Makers’ Summer Fair on Sunday in Acomb
Arts and crafts of the week: Makers’ Summer Fair, Bluebird Bakery, Acomb Road, Acomb, Sunday, 10am to 3pm; The Fox Summer Craft Market, The Fox Inn, Holgate Road, York, Sunday, 1pm to 5pm
ARTISAN baker and cafe Bluebird Bakery plays host to York artists and makers’ craft, jewellery, print, ceramic, plant, candle and woodwork stalls under one roof. Meanwhile, The Fox Inn holds its second annual Summer Craft Market, featuring live music, handmade gifts, craft stalls and street food vendors.
Swift service: Xenna pays homage to Taylor in Miss Americana at York Barbican
Tribute gig of the week: Miss Americana: The Eras Experience, A Tribute To Taylor Swift, York Barbican, Sunday, 7.30pm
STEP into Step into world ofTaylor Swift and her Eras experience in Xenna’s homage to the Pennsylvania pop sensation’s music, style and stage presence, from her country roots to such hits as Love Story, Blank Space and Shake It Off. Cue replica costume changes, storytelling and dancers too. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Dawn Landes: Amplifying the voices of women who fought for equality at Rise@Bluebird Bakery, Acomb
Country gig of the week: Dawn Landes, Rise@Bluebird Bakery, Acomb, York, July 2, 8pm
AMERICAN country roots singer-songwriter Dawn Landes showcases The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, her March 2024 album that re-imagines music from the women’s liberation movement.
Inspired by a 1971 songbook of the same name, Landes breathes new life into powerful songs spanning 1830 to 1970, amplifying the voices of women who fought for equality throughout history. Box office: seetickets.com/event/dawn-landes/rise-bluebird/.
James Sheldon’s Mr Darcy and Rosa Hesmondhalgh’s Lizzy Bennet in Pride And Prejudice at the SJT, Scarborough
Introducing America’s most performed living playwright to North Yorkshire: Pride And Prejudice, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, July 3 to 26, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees
LOTTE Wakeham directs American writer Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s story of love, misunderstandings and second chances, staged with music, dancing, humour aplenty and a cast led by Rosa Hesmondhalgh’s Lizzy Bennet (CORRECT) and James Sheldon’s Mr Darcy in a whirl of Regency parties and courtship as hearts race, tongues wag and passions swirl around the English countryside. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.
The Koala Who Could: Up a tree at York Theatre Royal for three days next week. Picture: Pamela Raith
Children’s show of the week: The Koala Who Could, York Theatre Royal, July 3, 1.30pm; July 4, 10.30am and 4.30pm; July 5, 11am and 2pm
JOIN Kevin the koala, Kangaroo and Wombat as they learn that “life can be great when you try something new” in this adaptation of Rachel Bright and Jim Field’s picture book, directed by Emma Earle, with music and lyrics by Eamonn O’Dwyer.
Danny Hendrix (Wombat/Storyteller 1), Sarah Palmer (Cossowary/Storyteller 2) and Christopher Finn (Kevin/Storyteller 3) perform this empowering story of embracing change – whether we like it or not. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Richard Hawley: Playing Coles Corner with strings attached at Live At York Museum Gardens on July 5. Picture: Dean Chalkley
Open-air concerts of the week: Futuresounds presents Live At York Museum Gardens, Elbow, July 3; Nile Rodgers & CHIC, July4; Richard Hawley, July 5; gates open at 5pm
LEEDS promoters Futuresound Group’s second summer of outdoor concerts in York begins with Bury band Elbow’s sold-out show next Thursday, when Ripon singer-songwriter Billie Marten and Robin Hood’s Bay folk luminary Eliza Carthy & The Restitution support.
New York guitarist, songwriter and producer Nile Rodgers and CHIC revel in Good Times, Le Freak, Everybody Dance and I Want Your Love next Friday, supported by Maryland soul singer Jalen Ngonda. Sheffield guitarist and crooner Richard Hawley revisits his 1995 album Coles Corner with a string section on its 20th anniversary next Saturday, preceded by Leeds band English Teacher and Manchester-based American songwriter BC Camplight. Box office: seetickets.com.
Le Consort: French orchestral ensemble, making York debut with Vivaldi concert at National Centre for Early Music on July 6
Festival of the week: York Early Music Festival, Heaven & Hell, July 4 to 11
EIGHT days of classical music adds up to 19 concerts featuring international artists such as The Sixteen, The Tallis Scholars, Academy of Ancient Music, viol consort Fretwork & Helen Charlston and the York debut of Le Consort, performing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons “but not quite as you know it”.
Directed by Delma Tomlin, the festival weaves together three main strands: the 400th anniversary of Renaissance composer Orlando Gibbons, the Baroque music of Vivaldi and Bach and reflections on Man’s fall from grace, from Heaven to Hell. Full programme and tickets at ncem.co.uk/whats-on/yemf/. Box office: 01904 658338.
In Focus: Harry Baker, Wonderful 2.0, The Crescent, York, Sunday (29/6/2025)
Poet, mathematician and world slam champ Harry Baker
YOUNGEST ever World Poetry Slam champion Harry Baker’s two Wonderful 2.0 shows at The Crescent , York, tomorrow have sold out. Wonderful news for Harry; not so wonderful if you were yet to book for either bite of the poetic cherry, the 3.30pm all-ages matinee or 7pm evening event.
Enough negativity. Let this preview be suffused with positivity. “One thing that I know that I will always find amazing is what a thing it is to live a life,” posits Maths graduate Harry, who always looks for plus signs. “P.S. Let’s also do this loads before we die.” Good, because that means Baker will be back and next time you can be quicker off the mark.
Baker, the 34-year-old poet, mathematician, writer and comedy turn from Ealing, London, first spread his Wonderful wings from April to August 2024, visiting The Crescent on May 20 with poems about wellies, postcodes and his favourite German wheat beer Schöfferhofer on his sold-out 40-date itinerary.
At the time, the “Maths-loving, TED-talking, German-speaking, battle-rapping, happy-crying, self-bio-writing unashamed human” said: “After the mental health struggles I shared in my last show, this time around the plan was to have a fun time touring a fun show full of fun poems to celebrate coming out of the other side. But it hasn’t quite worked out like that.
“For the first time ever I have been to more funerals than weddings in the last year. I have hit the age where everyone around me is either having babies or talking about having babies or definitely not having babies, and found out first-hand how complicated and painful that can be. And yet I am more fascinated and amazed by the world around me than ever before.”
Harry added: “From the transformational power of documenting moments of everyday joy to the undeniable raw energy of performing a garage song about Greta Thunberg, I am learning more than ever that life can indeed be incredibly hard sometimes, but that doesn’t make it any less incredible.
“If anything, it is the darkness that helps us to appreciate the light, just as it is the puddles that help us to appreciate the wellies. And what could be more wonderful than sharing all of this with the glorious folk who come along after reading about it here.”
Now he returns with a new message to accompany his poems about “all the important stuff, like hope, dinosaurs and German falafel-spoons”. “May one thing match the gravity of all you’ve ever done. This wonderful reality: The best is yet to come,” Harry pronounces.
“More full of wonder than ever”, he will celebrate wellies and postcodes once more, funerals and fertility journeys too, in his trademark amalgam of the playful, the vulnerable and the hopeful.
How would he sum up Wonderful 2.0? “I like ‘Wonderfuller’. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but I like the connotation,” he says.
“Wonderful 2.0 hopes to make you cry with laughter, laugh through tears, or, dream scenario: both. The show will contain old faves as well as brand new work, celebrating what a thing it is to live a life.”
“What I ended up doing was I started writing a poem a day for the first 100 days of my son’s life, though ‘poems’ would be a generous description of the first ones,” says Harry
For all his popularity on TikTok and Instagram, Baker’s favourite place to be is still on stage in front of an audience, sharing his words in person. “By its very nature, I don’t think it makes sense for poetry to go viral,” he says.
“It is all about taking the time out of your day-to-day to stop and pay attention to the world and the wonder it contains, which it feels like so many of us are too busy to be able to carve out time to do. And yet I think it is precisely this reason why people have been able to connect with my work so much.
“From the vulnerability of sharing my own personal struggles with trying to conceive a baby, to the power of making list of requests in advance of what I would like to happen when I die (an obnoxious amount of sunflowers and negronis all round, please), or even just a stupid (yet subversive?) poem about how great my knees are, there is a playfulness and poignancy that has changed the way others look at the world too.”
Harry continues: “I have been performing for 15 years now and last year’s tour was my favourite by far, because of the openness audiences were willing to bring and share in, so that we could all have a cry and a laugh and go away feeling slightly more connected to one another and the world, and I am so excited for a chance to do this all over again.”
Assessing where he fits in as a performer, Harry decides: “I think I fall somewhere in between a band (where you hope they will do your favourite songs) and a stand-up (where you expect new material!). So, as well as keeping in the classics, I have updated the show with new poems about everything that has happened in the meantime, including (finally and joyfully) having a baby.”
Wonderful 2.0 picks up where Wonderful left off, knowing his “whole life was about to change but not knowing how he would feel”. It turns out that becoming a father, and experiencing a deep love for his child, has heightened his connection with the world around him, rather than numbed it.
“What I ended up doing was I started writing a poem a day for the first 100 days of my son’s life, though ‘poems’ would be a generous description of the first ones!
“People say ‘it’s the best thing in the world’ or that ‘you’re going to lose everything you’ve enjoyed’, so I thought to be able to have all these snapshots in the poems means you can have days where you were in the moment, thinking how fragile and precious life is, but also have days where it doesn’t feel like that, especially in those early days, when if feels like ‘this is it, it will never change’.
“But having written these things, less than a year later, I look back and feel like ‘I think you’re being a bit dramatic’…but that’s fine because some of it felt amazing, sometimes it felt raw and spiky.
“Hopefully these poems will feel precious to me and my wife, and by sharing them, anyone who has recently has a baby will connect with them, or, like my parents, they can relate with them, and those who haven’t had a kid can connect with these basic emotions.”
Harry’s aim was to “capture the newness, the helplessness and the tenderness, not to create a parenting manual”. To detach from the practice of finding punchlines to jokes felt important in his writing. “I wanted to lean into the emotional side of it and that’s something that changes from day to day,” he says.
“This is the point in between where you can say ‘life can be difficult but also amazing, and if anything, one heightens the other’,” says Harry
Harry had written candidly about how long it took the couple to become pregnant. “To be so honest about that painful experience gave permission to connect with that, and now these new poems feel like an evolution,” he says.
“People have thanked me for ‘saying things they couldn’t’. I’ve been trying to open up in a way that is safe for me and safe for others, and having honed those skills, or muscles, I was ready to apply it to the new poems.
“It’s also trying to acknowledge that just because I have this child and this joyful outcome, it doesn’t negate the experience I’ve been through.”
The sequel to his Wonderful poetry collection will be published by Canongate next March. “This is the point in between where you can say ‘life can be difficult but also amazing, and if anything, one heightens the other’. If you can share the hard times with people, just as you share the joyous times, they’re more bearable for that.”
Poems have an intensity that suits the combative nature of slams. “When I started out, I was entering these poetry slams where you have to say everything in three minutes, win over the audience, be funny, get them on board, deliver a message, wrap it up and send it off into the sunset,” says Harry.
“That was such a good training ground because you have to convey things in such a short space of time. That’s why these Wonderful shows are such a joy to do, particularly when the poems can feel vulnerable and heartfelt, and it’s up to you where you take it next.”
Next year’s poetry collection, Tender, will reflect that. “Why ‘Tender’? I think it was that thing of wanting to lean into the feeling of vulnerability, but as well as the connotation of being tender where you feel bruised, there’s the ripeness and readiness too.”
Did you know?
HARRY Baker’s honest, heartfelt and hopeful poems have reached more than ten million people on TikTok and Instagram.
Raised in a Christian community, Baker is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2’s Pause For Thought.
He tours the UK in comedy-rap-jazz duo Harry and Chris Baker, also appearing on The Russell Howard Hour.
Baker released his third poetry collection, Wonderful, in May 2024, featuring fan favourites Wellies, Sunflowers and Sticky Toffee Pudding. Published by Burning Eye, copies are available at gigs, all good bookshops and www.harrybaker.co.
REVIEW: Through It All Together, Leeds Playhouse, until July 19 *****
Reece Dinsdale’s Howard and Shobna Gulati’s Sue in Through It All Together. Picture: Charlie Swinbourne
THROUGH It All Together is the third play about Leeds United after Anders Lustgarten’s ubiquitous, damnable The Damned United and Anthony Clavane and Nick Stimson’s lesser-spotted Promised Land, A Northern Love Story, staged in a community production with Red Ladder at Leeds Carriageworks Theatre in Summer 2012.
“About Leeds United” tells only half the story. The Damned United, adapted from David Peace’s literary psycho-drama, was rather more about Brian Clough, the Richard III of Leeds managers, and his 44-day impact on Revie’s champions versus their corrosive, longer-rooted impact on “Old Big ‘ead”.
A Promised Land, adapted from Clavane’s non-fiction book, interwove the repeat pattern of the rise and fall of Leeds United and the industries of Leeds with the story of the city’s Jewish community, who provided the club’s most successful chairmen, Manny Cussins and Leslie Silver.
Now Leeds United is only half the story once more in Chris O’Connor’s Through It All Together, a title taken from the club anthem Marching On Together (originally entitled Leeds! Leeds! Leeds! as the B-side to the official 1972 FA Cup Final song, Top Ten hit Leeds United, as the Courtyard theatre audience would all know!).
Forever Leeds fan O’Connor – known as “Leeds” at his London school – “could write one strand in his sleep”, and so the Leeds United story, a love letter to sainted Argentine maverick Marcelo Bielsa and his 2020 Championship champions, is indeed penned with all the self-deprecating humour, in-jokes, reverence and irreverence of a battle-hardened yet defiantly optimistic Peacocks supporter.
The other strand, drawn from the impact of dementia on the grandmother who helped to raise him, again is written from the inside track. “One aspect we really wanted to get right was making sure the show is dementia friendly and accurate to what people go through,” he told Graham Smyth [the Yorkshire Evening Post’s Leeds United reporter since 2019] in his interview for the Playhouse premiere’s excellent programme.
Your reviewer writes with investment too: both as a long-suffering Leeds United addict since 1969 and having experienced his father’s seven-year decline with dementia – it is never a battle – that ended in relief and release in January 2016.
O’Connor said he could be “incredibly confident and happy” with the Leeds United angle. He has taken every care – like the remarkable staff at dementia care homes – to bring similar authenticity to the dementia thread, backed by the work of Playhouse theatre and dementia research consultant Dr Nicky Taylor and the Courtyard corridor exhibition that rewards early arrival for perusal.
Director Gitika Buttoo says O’Connor’s play is “for the people of Leeds, showing how football ripples through all the corners of life…but that story, while rooted in Leeds, is universal”. She’s right. You could transplant the structure to any football club’s origin story, such is the ubiquity of a supporter’s jam-side-down relationship with fate, while dementia is becoming pervasive.
In this story, Reece Dinsdale’s life-long Leeds United fan Howard Wright is in the early throes of dementia, his life-changing diagnosis coinciding with director of football Victor Orta’s left-field pursuit and recruit of Marcelo Bielsa to end LUFC’s wilderness years amid the Championship tundra.
The volcanic Orta is represented physically by one of two Paul Madeleys in Buttoo’s cast, the multi-role-playing Dean Smith (regular “Championship will Championship” contributor to The Square Ball podcast, by the way).
He teams up with Everal A Walsh in three partnerships, representing the club management (Orta and a calmer presence alongside); the fans, a diehard Elland Road attendee and a disaffected deserter newly magnetised by Bielsa’s beautiful game; and the media, podcasting and match dissecting much in the healthily cynical/sceptical/supportive style of The Square Ball, quirky adverts et al.
Unlike the omnipresent Clough in The Damned United, Bielsa is not portrayed physically (save for a delightful fantasy sequence where he dances the Argentine Tango with Shobna Gulati’s Sue in Newell’s Old Boys kit in his 1970s’ defender days). Nor is he symbolised by Bielsa’s Bucket (on which he would surely perch if the club were ever to bestow him a statue).
Instead, as mystical as Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name turning up out of nowhere, and more in keeping with Irek “Tankpetrol” Jasutowicz’s Bielsa mural at Hyde Park Corner, St Marcelo appears in a stained glass window, beatific, aura aglow, high above his Peacock flock, within set designer Amanda Stoodley’s open-plan framework of a church. How fitting!
Church structure meets the kitchen-sink drama of the Wright household’s kitchen and sitting room, home to Dinsdale’s Howard and fellow Leeds devotee Sue (Gulati), joined regularly by daughter and putative chef Hazel (Natalie Davies).
They will, in the words of the club anthem, go through it all together, both Howard’s descent into dementia and Leeds United’s typically flattering-to-deceive yet, hardly a spoiler alert, ultimately sublime rise to the Premiership’s golden gates that coincided with Covid’s lockdowns.
Two forms of distancing then play out: the fans consigned to listening to Adam Pope on BBC Radio Leeds, and Howard’s losing his sentient powers to dementia’s corrosion and erosion.
O’Connor writes brilliantly and so movingly of this struggle: the “forgetfulness”, the sudden moments of lucid clarity (such as naming Don Revie’s champion team); Howard’s wish to not be a burden to his family by listing preparations to move to a care home while he still has the mental minerals to make that decision.
More and more sticker messages are placed around the house to help Howard navigate his way through each day’s routines; daughter Hazel starts to question whether the measures they take are worth it; Sue is consigned to hospital with Covid, at which point Dinsdale’s performance hits new heights.
All the while, he and Sue will sing Marching On Together as the couple’s love song, “We love you, Leeds, Leeds, Leeds” replaced by “I love you Sue, Sue, Sue”.
We know how it ended for LUFC, with promotion, only to be followed inevitably by Leeds falling apart again (as Walsh’s fan laments to the biggest knowing laughs).
We know how it will end for Howard, so we don’t need to see it. They will go through it all together, like Leeds United’s motto, side before self.
Dinsdale, a Playhouse luminary since 1990’s debut production of Wild Oats after the Quarry Hill relocation, is terrific in his King Lear for the football masses, all the more so for putting his Huddersfield Town allegiances to one side to embrace Leeds United.
The ever supportive Gulati, always a hit with Leeds audiences, the doughty Davies and the Smith-Walsh double act at the treble are tremendous too under Buttoo’s direction that makes the play work for fan and theatre lover alike.
You will laugh, you will cry, you will cheer and groan, you will sing the songs, just like at Elland Road; you will miss Marcelo and you will know someone like Howard. At some we shall all have to go through it together, as we have our ups and downs.
Chris O’Connor has told a story of the everyman (Howard) and the extraordinary (Bielsa) with dignity, distinction and devotion.
Through It All Together, Leeds Playhouse, at least until the world stops going round, or more precisely July 19. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or leedsplayhouse.org.uk.
Hats galore: Be Amazing Arts Youth Theatre’s guys in Guys And Dolls at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York
BE Amazing Arts and more amazing arts besides add up to attractions aplenty for Charles Hutchinson’s list of recommendations
Burgeoning talent of the week: Be Amazing Arts Youth Theatre in Guys And Dolls, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tomorrow to Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee
MALTON company Be Amazing Arts Youth Theatre heads to York to present Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows’ musical fable of Broadway, Guys And Dolls.
Set in Damon Runyon’s mythical New York City, this oddball romantic comedy finds gambler Nathan Detroit seeking the cash to set up the biggest craps game in town while the authorities breathe down his neck. Into the story venture his girlfriend, nightclub performer Adelaide, fellow gambler Sky Masterson and straight-laced missionary Sarah Brown. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.
The Wandering Hearts: Introducing new album Deja Vu (We Have All Been Here Before) at Pocklington Arts Centre
Americana gig of the week: The Wandering Hearts, Pocklington Arts Centre, tomorrow, 8pm
BRITISH Americana and folk band The Wandering Hearts combine enchanting harmonies and heartfelt songwriting influenced by Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and First Aid Kit.
Tomorrow’s set by Tara Wilcox, Francesca “Chess” Whiffin and A J Dean-Revington features songs from 2018’s Wild Silence, 2021’s The Wandering Hearts and 2024’s Mother, complemented by a showcase of new album Deja Vu (We Have All Been Here Before), released on June 20. Norwich singer-songwriter Lucy Grubb supports. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
Snow Patrol: More chance of sunshine than snow at Scarborough Open Air Theatre on Friday
Coastal gig of the week: Snow Patrol, Scarborough Open Air Theatre, Friday; gates open at 6pm
SNOW Patrol visit Scarborough Open Air Theatre on Friday for the first time since July 2021. The Northern Irish-Scottish indie rock band will be led as ever by Gary Lightbody, accompanied by long-time members Nathan Connolly, lead guitar, and Johnny McDaid, piano. Box office: scarboroughopenairtheatre.com.
Danny Lee Grew: 24K Magic at Friargate Theatre, York
Magic show of the week: Danny Lee Grew, 24K Magic, Friargate Theatre, York, Friday, 7.30pm
CLACTON-ON-SEA magician Danny Lee Grew presents his new mind-boggling one-man show of magic, illusion, laughs, gasps and sleight of hand sorcery. 24K Magic showcases the kind of magic usually seen on television, but now live, in the flesh and under the most impossible conditions. Box office: ticketsource.co.uk/ridinglights.
Olly Murs: Returning to York Racecourse for Summer Music Saturday
Back on track: Olly Murs, York Racecourse, Summer Music Saturday, June 28, first race at 1.55pm; last race, 5.25pm, followed by concert
ESSEX singer, songwriter, actor and television personality from Olly Murs completes his hat-trick of appearances at York Racecourse this weekend, having played the Knavesmire track in 2010 and 2017.
Performing after Saturday’s race card, his set list will draw on his seven albums and 25 singles, including the number ones Please Don’t Let Me Go, Heart Skips A Beat, Dance With Me Tonight and Troublemaker and Top Five hits Thinking Of Me, Dear Darlin, Wrapped Up and Up. Race day tickets: yorkracecourse.co.uk.
Hotbuckle Productions’ Little Women, on tour at Helmsley Arts Centre. Picture: Peter Mould
Ryedale play of the week: Hotbuckle Productions in Little Women, Helmsley Arts Centre, Saturday, 7.30pm
SHROPSHIRE company Hotbuckle Productions follow up last year’s tour of Pride And with Adrian Preater’s typically inventive make-over of Louisa May Alcott’s American novel Little Women, performed by a cast of only three, Joanna Purslow, Gemma Aston and MaryAnna Kelly.
Hotbuckle explore girlhood, family and female ambition in Alcott’s tale of love, loss and the challenges of growing up in 19th century Massachusetts in a fast-paced, humorous, multi-role-playing adaptation that crosses age and gender traditions as the four March sisters journey from adolescence to adulthood. Box office: 01439 771700 or helmsleyarts.co.uk.
Justin Moorhouse: Giving two of the greatest performances of his life at Pocklington Arts Centre this weekend
Comedy gig of the week: Justin Moorhouse, The Greatest Performance Of My Life, Pocklington Arts Centre, Saturday, 3pm and 8pm
ASHTON-UNDER-LYNE comedian, radio presenter and actor Justin Moorhouse covers subjects ranging from pantomimes to dreams, how to behave in hospitals, small talk, realising his mum is a northern version of Columbo, and how being a smart-mouthed child saved him from a life of continually being beaten up. Funny, interesting, perhaps it will warm the soul too. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
Dawn Landes: Performing at Rise@Bluebird Bakery, Acomb, York
Country gig of the week: Dawn Landes, Rise@Bluebird Bakery, Acomb, York, July 2, 8pm
AMERICAN country roots singer-songwriter Dawn Landes showcases The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, her March 2024 album that re-imagines music from the women’s liberation movement.
Inspired by a 1971 songbook of the same name, Landes breathes new life into powerful songs spanning 1830 to 1970, amplifying the voices of women who fought for equality throughout history. Box office: seetickets.com/event/dawn-landes/rise-bluebird/.
James Sheldon’s Mr Darcy and Rosa Hesmondhalgh’s Lizzy Bennet in Pride And Prejudice at the SJT, Scarborough
Introducing America’s most performed living playwright to North Yorkshire: Pride And Prejudice, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, July 3 to 26, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees
BOLTON Octagon Theatre artistic director Lotte Wakeham directs American writer Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice in a co-production with the SJT, Hull Truck Theatre and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick.
Austen’s story of love, misunderstandings and second chances is staged with music, dancing and humour aplenty in a whirl of Regency parties and courtship as hearts race, tongues wag and passions swirl around the English countryside, with a cast led by Rosa Hesmondhalgh’s Lizzy Bennet and James Sheldon’s Mr Darcy. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.
Danny Hendrix, Christopher Finn and Sarah Palmer in The Koala Who Could. Picture: Pamela Raith
Children’s show of the week: The Koala Who Could, York Theatre Royal, July 3, 1.30pm; July 4, 10.30am and 4.30pm; July 5, 11am and 2pm
JOIN Kevin the koala, Kangaroo and Wombat as they learn that “life can be great when you try something new” in this adaptation of Rachel Bright and Jim Field’s picture book, directed by Emma Earle (Oi Frog & Friends!), with music and lyrics by Eamonn O’Dwyer (The Lion Inside).
Danny Hendrix (Wombat/Storyteller 1), Sarah Palmer (Cossowary/Storyteller 2) and Christopher Finn (Kevin/Storyteller 3) perform this empowering story of embracing change – whether we like it or not. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
James Sheldon’s Mr Darcy and Rosetta Hesmondhalgh’s Lizzy Bennett in Pride And Prejudice. Picture: Pamela Raith
LOTTE Wakeham’s new production of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice comes to Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre from July 3 to 26 in an adaptation by American writer Kate Hamill.
This co-production between the SJT, Octagon Theatre, Bolton, Hull Truck Theatre and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, in association with Theatr Clwyd, Mold, opened at Bolton on June 5.
Hamill’s witty adaptation brings to life Austen’s story of love, misunderstandings and second chances, with music and dancing aplenty, in a whirl of Regency parties and courtship as hearts race, tongues wag and passions swirl around the English countryside.
Combining sharp humour and sparkling dialogue, Hamill’s re-telling uncovers the absurdities and thrills of finding the perfect (or imperfect) match in life.
Leading Wakeham’s cast at the heart of the love story are Rosa Hesmondhalgh as Lizzy Bennet and James Sheldon as Mr Darcy, joined by Aamira Challenger, Jessica Ellis, Ben Fensome, Joanna Holden, Dyfrig Morris, Eve Pereira and Kiara Nicole Pillai.
Octagon Theatre artistic director Wakeham says: “As a huge Austen fan, I am delighted to be directing this vibrant, witty and funny production, which has been adapted brilliantly by Kate Hamill. We have a stellar cast and creative team on board to bring this iconic story to life.”
Joining Wakeham and Hamill in the creative team are movement director Jonnie Riordan; composer and musical director Sonum Batra; set and costume designer Louie Whitemore; lighting designer Jamie Platt and sound designer Andy Graham.
New York writer Kate Hamill. Picture: SubUrban Photography
Here Jeannie Swales puts questions to Kate Hamill about her adaptation of Pride And Prejudice.
What is it about Jane Austen, an early 19th-century Englishwoman, who rarely, if ever, travelled more than 100 miles from her rural home, that speaks to you as a 21st -century New Yorker?
“Well, I got interested in her work in a couple of different ways. I just love the novels and have read them many times. I spent a semester in London when I was at university, and I went to Bath and her house and the whole bit.
“But I take a new play approach to adaptations – I really treat it as a collaboration between myself and the original author, who is sometimes currently dead!
“And Jane Austen is interested in a lot of the same things that I’m interested in. She’s very, very funny, obviously. She’s really interested in how the dictates of our conscience clash with what society expects of us.
“She was very much a proto-feminist. I really wanted to adapt her books in the order that she wrote them – I’ve just finished Emma – so Pride And Prejudice was my second. I wanted to trace her journey and make each of
the plays very different. I also wanted to present them in a totally new way. “I like really irreverent, theatrical shows that treat something as a new play and are in conversation with the original, not just a copy-and-paste version. So I felt like Jane, who I sympathised with a lot and who was interested in a lot of the same things I was, was a great collaborator.”
Joanna Holden and Dyfrig Morrisin Pride And Prejudice. Picture: Pamela Raith
How do you approach adapting these stories? How do you identify theelements and incidents that you want to keep or lose?
“Jane [Austen] has been adapted a million times, so I’m really interested in what I have to bring to it. The original is always going to be the original; I don’t just want to create a copy. I want to create a work of theatre that is interesting to both people who know the novel and people who don’t know it at all.
“But also I want to create something that’s new and surprising even for people who do know the novel. I read the original and see what it brings out in me, the thematic questions, and then I write it very much as a new play in conversation with the original, cutting out anything that dramaturgically doesn’t work with that new play.
“So, for instance, with Pride And Prejudice, I was really interested in how we know that we’ve found the perfect match in life. Even now, and certainly in Jane Austen’s day, we treat love like a mix between a game and a war – down to tactics and strategies.
“I got very interested in the game theory – there are even [dating] books with titles like The Game and The Rules. So I wanted a play structure that’s very high stakes, and halfway between a game and a war, and I thought, that’s a farce.
“And then I thought, there’s been a bunch of different versions, down to Pride And Prejudice with zombies, and all sorts of loose adaptations like Bridget Jones’s Diary, which I’m a particular fan of, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as a farce before.”
Aamira Challenger and Rosa Hesmondhalghin Pride And Prejudice. Picture: Pamela Raith
Talking of the perfect match – the first production of your version of Pride And Prejudice starred you and your now-husband, Jason O’Connell, as Lizzy and Darcy…
“I actually met Jason about five years before I wrote Pride And Prejudice, and at the time I had a boyfriend. I met him and shook his hand, and it was like a bell went off in my head – something I’d never experienced before.
“And I thought, ‘oh, that is trouble and weird’, but I ignored it for about a year until I was single again. When I wrote Pride And Prejudice, we were starting to talk about marriage, and I had historically been someone who’d been frightened of marriage,
“I didn’t think it was for me, and now I’m very happily married. But I think Pride And Prejudice was my way of exploring all the different kinds of matches, and how they go wrong and how they go right. And yes, in the world premiere, I played Lizzy and he played Darcy, so I got to experience all that catharsis live!”
You have been frustrated by the dearth of shows with a feminist gaze, leading to a $100 bet with a friend, and from there to your first play, Sense And Sensibility. Was that bet the crystallisation of a long, slow process, or was it a light bulb moment?
“I think it probably just catalysed something that had been building in me. I think quite often I write from a place of great love, or great anger, and sometimes both.
Rosa Hesmondhalgh, left, Joanna Holden and Aamira Challenger in Pride And Prejudice. Picture: Pamela Raith
“I love the theatre; I think it’s a transformative place, one of the few public spaces left that are sort of public squares, where you can have this live catharsis and you’re not just staring at a screen.
“But at that time, at least in the States, playwriting was very much a male-dominated field. In fact, at that point, the primary adaptor of Austen in the States was a man.
“Not that there’s anything at all wrong with men adapting Austen, of course, but I felt like this is this very important female writer and she’s not even being told through a female gaze.
“I infamously went out with my friend, and we split a couple of bottles of wine, and I wrote her a $100 dollar cheque and said, ‘if I don’t have a first draft to you in six months, you can cash this’.
“At the time I was very poor, so that would have meant not making my rent. So I always highly recommend to writers: write a cheque and give it to a friend you know will cash it!”
Director Lotte Wakeham rehearsing Pride And Prejudice at Octagon Theatre, Bolton. Picture: Bolton Documentary Photography
If you could go back in a time machine to meet Jane Austen, what would you like to discuss with her?
“First of all, I think she would be so fun to talk to! I‘ve read her letters and I’ve put parts of them in some of my adaptations, and she’s so cutting and mean – but in the most delightful way.
“I think I’d enjoy sitting and talking with her. I’d also like to ask her what drove her to write so prodigiously. She partially paralysed her thumb from pressing down so hard – she just wrote and wrote and wrote and eventually developed this thing.
“I read somewhere else that visitors would come and she would hide away so she could carry on writing. It’s so hard to write even now sometimes – and I have computers, and I live in a world where women can take ownership of their own work and get paid some money for it.
“I’m fascinated by what drove her to write so brilliantly at a time when it was all longhand and between social calls. Also, I feel like she’d got pigeon-holed as fusty, romantic, girly literature, and when I started reading her more seriously I was shocked by how funny and how socially smart she is.
Kiara Nicola Pillai, left, Aamira Challenger and Rosa Hesmondhalgh in rehearsal for Pride And Prejudice. Picture: Bolton Documentary Photography
“I think it’s quite sexist when she’s just as brilliant as Dickens, or Hawthorne, or Thackeray or any of those men who are sometimes maybe taken a bit more seriously. I think I would just sit at her feet. And maybe beg her pardon a little bit.”
One final question: what do you think Jane would have made of the Trump family?
“Oh, she would have hated them! I think she would have absolutely loathed them and skewered them. Maybe that’s what I would talk to her about…”
Pride & Prejudice, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, July 3 to 26, 7.30pm, Monday to Saturday, plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office:01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com. Also at Hull Truck Theatre, September 18 to October 11. Box office: 01482 323638 or hulltruck.co.uk.
Did you know?
KATE Hamill was named 2017’s Playwright of the Year by the Wall Street Journal and was among the ten most-produced playwrights in the United States from 2017 to 2024. She is now the most-produced living playwright in the USA.
“The rule should be, if the audience stops laughing, you have to try something different,” says Sara Pascoe. That’s the beauty of comedy: it’s not pressure, it’s liberating”
HOW does comedian, actor, playwright, author, TV presenter and new mum Sara Pascoe quantify success?
She seeks to provide the answer in her biggest tour yet, Success Story, whose 50 dates in two blocks from November 10 to December 3 2022 and January 26 to April 22 next year take in four Yorkshire gigs: York Barbican on November 24 (7.30pm); Sheffield Octagon, the next night; Hull City Hall, March 17, and Harrogate Royal Hall, April 21.
She is delighted to be returning to the road for the first time since her LadsLadsLads tour of 2018-2019, the one where she contemplated the positive aspects of self-imposed celibacy, exploring love, sex and doing both alone.
This time, expect “name-dropping, personal stories and anecdotes,” says Sara, who will deliver jokes about status, celebrities, plus her new fancy lifestyle versus infertility, her multiple therapists and career failures.
“What I want to explore is how do we define success and when do we define it. Does it change with age? Do we only want things we can’t have? When we attain our goals, do we move the goal posts and become unsatisfied with what we’ve got and want something else instead?
“I’m 41 now and it’s a reflective time; it feels like a very adult age. Looking back on my life to when I was 14, I really wanted to be on television. That’s where I work now but is it what I imagined it to be?”
The trigger for Success Story were her experiences when undergoing IVF after a miscarriage. “When I was going through that with my partner [Australian comedian Steen Raskopoulos], they kept talking about it in terms of success,” says Sara, who became a mum on Valentine’s Day this year at the age of 40.
“I started thinking about success, what I wanted as a child, and then thinking about what makes you happy, or if you’ve set out on a certain path that makes you unhappy, should you do something else?”
“If you’ve set out on a certain path that makes you unhappy, should you do something else?” ponders Sara Pascoe in Success Story
Deciding she wanted to be famous at 14, Dagenham-born Sara would go on to audition for Barrymore, scare Dead Or Alive’s Pete Burns and ruin Hugh Grant’s birthday, but she would also notch a decade in stand-up comedy and pen the feminist Animal: The Autobiography Of A Female Body in 2016 and her exploration of sex through the medium of evolutionary psychology, sex work, and the role of money in modern heterosexual relationships in Sex Power Money in 2019, spawning an accompanying podcast.
Her “big, bold and funny” stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice played York Theatre Royal in October 2017 and she wrote and starred in the October 2020 sitcom Out Of Her Mind on BBC Two. She has presented television shows too, hosting Comedians Giving Lectures on Dave, Guessable on Comedy Central, BBC Two’s Last Woman On Earth and this year’s BBC One series of The Great British Sewing Bee.
“What quite often happens with stand-up comedy, it doesn’t take up a lot of your time, when it’s your main job. You have a lot of time on your hands, when that main job only takes up an evening five times a week.
“You can do other things, like writing a book, where they aren’t looking for gags, whereas you can’t go half an hour without a joke in a stand-up show,” says Sara.
Hence her diversification. “It’s more about thinking, ‘oh, that would be good to have a go at that’, rather than worrying about being found out at one thing,” she reasons.
How do you judge success in comedy? “I’ve noted that some people, once they get to the top, they then plateau, and that can be hard, as not everyone can be a stadium comic,” says Sara.
She enjoys the expectation of having to come up with fresh material for every new tour, whereas the success of a band’s gig is often judged on which hits they played, which they chose to leave out.
“It’s horrible when a gig becomes dead behind the eyes,” says Sara, outlining what to avoid when seeking comedy success
“That’s the added benefit of doing comedy. I was thinking how boring it must be to always have to play songs from 20 years ago when the bands probably hate them by now, whereas comedians have to move on, just as people do when they can’t keep talking about a divorce or an old girlfriend,” says Sara, who switched from the repetition of performing theatre to the freshly squeezed juice of comedy.
“You’re quite often in a different place by the end of a tour and your set reflects that. It’s horrible when a gig becomes dead behind the eyes.
“I remember being told very early in my career how Bill Bailey always had five minutes of new material each night, working it into shape for the next tour, and it’s true that if you try out new bits after the interval, you’re never dead behind the eyes.”
Sara continues: “The rule should be, if the audience stops laughing, you have to try something different. That’s the beauty of comedy: it’s not pressure, it’s liberating. If you have three nights in a row where people aren’t connecting, throw that material in the bin. Actors can’t do that!
“At the end of a show, you don’t want a crowd going ‘yeah, that was fine’. You want them to say, ‘oh god, do you remember that bit?’. You want an audience to be engaged in what you’re saying.”
At the time of this phone interview, Sara was busy writing a book and filming the latest series of The Great British Sewing Bee. She could reveal that those shows would be broadcast on BBC One next spring; she could say rather less, however, about her next venture into print.
“We’ve not done a proper release yet,” she says. “Put something vague… ‘I’m moving into fiction’. It’s a chance to make some things up for a change.” Watch this space.
Tickets for Sara Pascoe’s Success Story tour are on sale at sarapascoe.co.uk/sara-on-tour; for York Barbican at yorkbarbican.co.uk; Harrogate, 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk.
Setting the record straight: Adrian Lukis as George Wickham 30 years after Pride And Prejudice in Being Mr Wickham
REVIEW: Adrian Lukis in Being Mr Wickham, Original Theatre Company, Haunted Season, York Theatre Royal, today at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
TWO years ago, 25 years on from filming the BBC adaptation of Pride And Prejudice, actor Adrian Lukis started thinking about still being Mr Wickham, having “defended his dubious reputation” for so long.
What would have become of Jane Austen’s Georgian rogue George, or “What happens to a rake when he can’t rake anymore,” as Lukis asked himself?
Harper Lee revisited the characters of To Kill A Mockingbird in Go Set A Watchman; Danny Boyle’s 2017 film T2: Trainspotting picked up the story of Mark Renton, Sick Boy and co 20 years on; in this instance, the writing falls to Lukis and Georgian storyteller Catherine Curzon.
Refracting Austen’s vilified character through their shared lens for a one-man character study set 30 years down the line of worn time, Lukis’s Wickham is now 60, still charming, with aching knees and wife Lydia waiting in the bedroom, as he tells his side of the story.
Lukis reimagined him living in reduced circumstances, having gambled his way through his £3,000 pay-off from Darcy, no longer reliant on his looks and his wits, having left behind the dissolute London life. Maybe he was residing in Yeovil, or maybe running a small business in Malmesbury, definitely he was looking out of the window for the tittle-tattle of life across the way, so he told Thursday’s audience in the Q&A after the 75-minute performance.
Wouldn’t you rather spend a night out with Mr Wickham than Mr Darcy, speculated Adrian Lukis in his post-show question-and-answer session
Lukis constructed an earlier version of this monologue but found his ageing Wickham too sleazy. Lockdown enabled him and Curzon to create Wickham mark two: a rake raking over the coals and setting the record straight. Actors must always empathise with whoever they play, runs the advice to those playing the villain of the piece, and Lukis warms to that task with relish as he reacquaints himself with “my old friend”.
Yes, Wickham was “a bit of player”, yes he behaved badly, even disgracefully on occasion, but as Lukis said afterwards, but wouldn’t you rather have a night out with gorgeous, affable George than Darcy?
Significantly, Lukis said he treated this Wickham as a new character when writing and playing him, rather than as the Austen rogue he played in Andrew Davies’s adaptation. What emerges is a story of loss, exits; his rueful reflections on Elizabeth Bennet, Darcy and Lord Byron; the blood, the smell, the gore, of the Waterloo battlefield. What has Wickham achieved at 60? He has survived, he says. He has survived, he repeated.
Being Mr Wickham is beautifully detailed, from the elaborate Georgian phrasing of Lukis and Curzon to Libby Watson’s faded drawing room design, to Guy Unsworth’s immaculately composed direction and Lukis’s eloquent, elegant performance.
Life with a scandalous scoundrel is never dull and it certainly still isn’t in Being Mr Wickham, even if the heat has gone out of the day and those knees are aching ever more.
One last story from the Q&A: when first meeting for filming, actress Susannah Harker (Jane Bennet) misheard Lukis, thinking he said he was the wig man and promptly asking him to make adjustments. No, he would be playing Mr Wickham, he corrected her, and he is still being Mr Wickham to charming effect all these years later.
Review by Charles Hutchinson
George Wickham, the survivor, in Adrian Lukis’s characterisation in Being Mr Wickham
Setting the record straight: Adrian Lukis’s roguish George Wickham in Being Mr Wickham at York Theatre Royal
AUTUMN’S fruits are ripe and ready for Charles Hutchinson to pick with no worries about shortages.
Scandal of the week: Being Mr Wickham, Original Theatre Company, York Theatre Royal, tonight until Saturday, 7.30pm; 2.30pm, Saturday
ADRIAN Lukis played the vilified George Wickham in the BBC’s television adaptation of Pride And Prejudice 26 years ago this very month.
Time, he says, to set the record straight about Jane Austen’s most charmingly roguish character in his one-man play Being Mr Wickham, co-written with Catherine Curzon.
This is the chance to discover Wickham’s version of famous literary events. What really happened with Mr Darcy? What did he feel about Lizzie? What went on at Waterloo? Not to mention Byron. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Cate Hamer in rehearsal for the SJT and Live Theatre, Newcastle co-production of The Offing. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
Play of the week outside York: The Offing, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until October 30
IN a Britain still reeling from the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on an adventure at 16: to walk from his home in Durham to Scarborough, where he hopes to find work, but he never arrives there.
Instead, up the coast at Robin Hood’s Bay, a chance encounter with the bohemian, eccentric Dulcie Piper leads to a lifelong, defining friendship. She introduces him to the joys of good food and wine, art and literature; he helps her lay to rest a ghost in Janice Okoh’s adaptation of Benjamin Myers’s novel for the SJT and Live Theatre, Newcastle. Box office: 01723 370541 or at sjt.uk.com.
Simon Wright: Conducting York Guildhall Orchestra at York Barbican
Classic comeback: York Guildhall Orchestra, York Barbican, Saturday, 7.30pm
YORK Guildhall Orchestra return to the concert stage this weekend after the pandemic hiatus with a programme of operatic favourites, conducted by Simon Wright.
The York musicians will be joined by Leeds Festival Chorus and two soloists, soprano Jenny Stafford, and tenor Oliver Johnston, to perform overtures, arias and choruses by Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Rossini, Mozart, Puccini and Verdi. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Adam Kay: Medic, author and comedian, on visiting hours at Grand Opera House, York, on Sunday
Medical drama of the week: Adam Kay, This Is Going To Hurt, Secret Diaries Of A Junior Doctor, Grand Opera House, Sunday, 8pm
ADAM Kay, medic turned comic, shares entries from his diaries as a junior doctor in his evening of horror stories from the NHS frontline, savvy stand-up, witty wordplay and spoof songs.
His award-winning show, This Going To Hurt, has drawn 200,000 people to sell-out tours, the Edinburgh Fringe and West End runs, and the book of the same name topped the best sellers list for more than a year and is soon to be a BBC drama. Box office: 0844 871 7615 or at atgtickets.com/york.
Boyzlife: Keith Duffy and Brian McFadden unite in Boyzone and Westlife songs at York Barbican
Irish night of the week: Boyzlife, York Barbican, Sunday, 7.30pm; doors, 6.30pm
PUT Irish boy band graduates Brian McFadden, from Westlife, and Keith Duffy, from Boyzone, together and they become Boyzlife, as heard on the July 2020 album Strings Attached, recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
On tour with a full band, but not the ‘Phil’, they choose songs from a joint back catalogue of 18 number one singles and nine chart-topping albums.
So many to squeeze in…or not: No Matter What, Flying Without Wings, World Of Our Own, Queen Of My Heart, Picture Of You, Uptown Girl, You Raise Me Up, Going Gets Tough, Swear It Again, Father And Son, Love Me For A Reason and My Love. Find out on Sunday. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk
Thumper: Dublin band play Ad Nauseam and much more at Fulford Arms, York, on Tuesday
Loudest gig of the week: Thumper, Fulford Arms, York, Tuesday, 8pm
THUMPER, the cult Dublin band with two thumping drummers, are back on the road after you know what, promoting a 2021 mix of their single Ad Nauseam: a cautionary tale of repetition, vanity and becoming too close to what you know will eat you.
From the Irish city of the equally visceral Fontaines DC and The Murder Capital, Thumper have emerged with their ragged guitars and “bratty, frenetic punk rock” (Q magazine).
Now their debut album is taking shape after the band were holed up in their home studio for months on end. The Adelphi, Hull, awaits on Wednesday.
At the fourth time of planning: Mary Coughlan, Pocklington Arts Centre, Tuesday, 8pm
Mary Coughlan: Life Stories in song at Pocklington Arts Centre
GALWAY jazz and blues chanteuse Mary Coughlan had to move her Pocklington show three times in response to the stultifying pandemic.
“Ireland’s Billie Holliday” twice rearranged the gig during 2020, and did so again this year in a switch from April 23 to October 19.
At the heart of Mary’s concert, fourth time lucky, will still be Life Stories, her 15th album, released on the wonderfully named Hail Mary Records last September. Box office: 01759 301547 or at pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
Spiers & Boden: Resurrected folk duo head to Pocklington on Wednesday
Double act of the week ahead: Spiers & Boden, Pocklington Arts Centre, Wednesday, 7.30pm
AFTER years of speculation, much-loved English folk duo Spiers & Boden are back together, releasing the album Fallow Ground and bringing a live show to Pocklington this autumn with special guests.
First forming a duo in 2001, John Spiers, now 46, and Jon Boden, 44, became leading lights in big folk band Bellowhead, resting the duo in 2014, before Bellowhead headed into the sunset in 2016. Solo endeavours ensued but now Spiers & Boden return. Box office: 01759 301547 or at pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
Matilda takes on Miss Trunchbull in Matilda The Musical Jr
Musical of the week: Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical Jr, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, October 20 to 24, 7.30pm; 2pm, 4.30pm, Saturday; 2pm, Sunday.
ONLY the last few tickets are still available for York Stage Musicals’ York premiere of the Broadway Junior version of Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s story.
Matilda has astonishing wit, intelligence, imagination…and special powers! Unloved by her cruel parents, she nevertheless impresses teacher Miss Honey, but mean headmistress Miss Trunchbull hates children and just loves thinking up new punishments for those who fail to abide by her rules. Hurry, hurry to the box office: 01904 501935 or at josephrowntheatre.co.uk.
KMA Creative Collective artist Kit Monkman studies KMA’s commission for York Mediale, People We Love. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
Worth noting too:
PEOPLE We Love, the York Mediale installation, reopening at York Minster from Saturday. York Design Week, full of ideas, October 20 to 26, at yorkdesign week.com; Light Night Leeds 2021, with a Back To Nature theme for this art and lights festival tonight and tomorrow, at whatson.leeds.gov.uk; Live At Leeds gigs across 20 venues with Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, Sports Team, The Night Café, The Big Moon, Dream Wife, Poppy Adjuda, The Orielles and Thumper, at liveatleeds.com.
