Tag: James Turner

When We Were Women by Sharman MacDonald, Orange Tree Theatre, 5 September 2015

I had been really looking forward to this one. I recalled seeing and liking the companion piece, When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream And Shout, many years ago.

Sadly,  this one was rather grim and dark by comparison. Well acted, well directed, but neither Janie nor I much liked the play.

Here is a link to the Orange Tree’s stub for the production, which was reasonably well received – the stub includes some good quotes from the reviews.

As usual, we didn’t feel we’d wasted our time and enjoyed our evening out, not least our Don Fernando dinner which we almost always enjoy as an occasional treat after the Orange Tree.

 

buckets by Adam Barnard, Orange Tree Theatre, 30 May 2015

An interesting short play, this one, lots of tiny vignettes not really connected other than a general theme around bucket lists.

The title actually is “buckets” with a small “b”. Not sure if that is significant or just modern “mess with capitalisation” stuff.

There’s real “what was that all about” weirdness about this play – I’m pretty sure Janie said that as we left – but still we enjoyed some of the scenes and performances. We had plenty to talk about afterwards.

It reminded me, actually, of the sort of experimental stuff Sam Walters used to do above the pub back in the “original Orange Tree” days.

Excellent on-line resource with all the details, in the modern Orange Tree way – click here. Lots of review quotes in there but tellingly the one from the Guardian is excluded. In his gentle, pro-Orange Tree style I think Michael Billington sums it up very well – click here.

Yes, we went for Spanish food at Don Fernando afterwards, That’s normally what we do.