Stephe Harrop

Hard Times is one of those novels where everyone knows the start (tyrannical schoolmaster Gradgrind and the definition of “horse”), but no-one seems to know the ending. Icon Theatre’s production…

Euripides’ Alcestis, a not-quite-tragic Greek tragedy, centres upon a wife’s self-sacrificing decision to die in her doomed husband’s place. Ted Hughes’ version of the play is a visceral and uncompromising…

In Aristophanes’ The Birds, a city in the clouds is the background to an ambivalent satire on utopianism and realpolitik. Cloudcuckooland, a musical for children, re-imagines Aristophanes’ comedy as a…

Annamation are a trio of wise women, with the voices of angels and a taste for low comedy. In their current show Tongue and Groove, fantastical, sometimes terrible tales are…

365 from the National Theatre of Scotland follows a series of teenagers emerging from care, and taking their first steps towards independence in ‘practice flats’. David Harrower’s drama explores the…

In December 1978, with the Winter of Discontent in full swing, three generations of a working-class family gather in a living-room in Hull. Patriarch Dad is in denial about his…

Lorca Dreams is a strange and playfully morbid fantasia on the life and works of Federico García Lorca. Performed in Spanish with English surtitles, the piece weaves together extracts from…

In The Elephant’s Child and Just So from Metta Theatre, a company of eight present a series of semi-improvised animal fables, followed by a puppet-opera explaining the origin of the…

It’s a production without concept, in which the actors feverishly juggling words, words, words keep revealing brilliant new facets of a familiar text, then tossing them away with spendthrift unconcern.

Her Naked Skin is a bit like its heroine: courageous, demanding, articulate, divided, unpredictable and – despite good intentions – ultimately alienating.