Tezza's Theatre Place

Paul McEwan. Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost. Unicorn Theatre. Photo Manuel Harlan Halloween may be over, but the festive season is often a time for a haunting or two – think Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. One story of things that go bump in the night is Oscar Wilde’s  The Canterville Ghost  currently having a spooky outing at the Unicorn Theatre. American diplomat Hiram Otis (Nana Amoo-Gottfried) is a happy man. He works for the US State Department and lives in a nice part of New York State with his celebrated interior designer wife Lucretia (Beth Cordingly) and children – inventor Washington (Nathaniel Wade), keen gardener Virginia (Safiyya Ingar) and the mischievous film-making twins, Stars (Mae Munuo) and Stripes (Rose-Marie Christian). Their lives are good and their days are full. However, that is about to change as Hiram’s bosses have decided to post him, and therefore his family, to England. Otis crosses the pond first and sets about finding a house for the family...

Ghost Stories – Caretaker As the nights draw in, thoughts turn to the autumn and winter celebrations. Right now, that means Halloween and for those of you that like a bit of a fright in your life, I can offer you no better play that  Ghost Stories  at the Ambassadors Theatre. This is a show where, rather like  The Mousetrap  next door, they ask the audience to keep the secrets and I can fully understand why. As plays go, whilst not being truly immersive,  Ghost Stories  is a production that needs to be experienced. Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman have written a fascinating set of stories. The tales are linked together by parapsychologist Professor Phillip Goodman (Simon Lipkin) who has recorded each event and provides his own, more down to earth, ideas of what happened to elderly night watchman Tony (Garry Cooper), wayward teenager Simon (Preston Nyman) and city financier Mike (Richard Sutton). And there is nothing to fault in this production. I both love ...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/197527/review-father-of-lies-vault-festival/ Sasha Roberts and Tom Worsley in Father of Lies One of the amazing things about the Vault Festival – currently in full swing under Waterloo Station – is the sheer variety of productions that can be seen. I’ve watched a feminist show using the magic of Madonna’s music to get the point across, a farce based around the Holocaust, not to mention a dodgy one-act play about a bus stop and a cello. However, my latest venture to the festival was my first horror show as I went into the Cavern to see Bête Noire Productions’  Father of Lies . Father of Lies  is written and performed by Sasha Roberts and Tom Worsley, two very amiable young men with a taste for the macabre. Their production is based on a true story of a murder, or maybe a double murder, that took place in Würzburg, in what was then West Germany in 1973. It is part presentation and part reenactment as the two guys take the audience t...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/155565/m-r-james-ghost-stories-for-christmas-review/ Robert Lloyd Parry as M R James – credit Shelagh Bidwell For some reason, Christmas and ghost stories seem to fit together very well – think Charles Dickens and ‘A Christmas Carol’. One of the best writers of such stories is currently having his work celebrated as Nunkie Theatre Company bring  M R James: Ghost Stories for Christmas  to The Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington. Over three nights, Robert Lloyd Parry sits, the epitome of a late nineteenth/early twentieth century Cambridge don, and recounts six of Montague Rhodes James atmospheric stories. The two I saw were “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” and “The Mezzotint”. Although the show was completely sold out, with audience members sitting on the steps around the stage, there was barely a hint of sound as the intro music – a gentle Elizabethan style singing by a countertenor which put me in mind of the closing credits number from B...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/153766/review-of-scrooge-and-the-seven-dwarves-theatre-503/ Sleeping Trees, Scrooge and the Seven Dwarves – courtesy of David Monteith-Hodge It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to know that I used to enjoy the series ‘Glee’. Part of the reason for this was the way they used to do ‘mash-ups’ where they took two completely different songs and interweaved them together to form one complete tune – for example, ‘Don’t Stand So Close to me’ and ‘Young Girl’. I mention this because, for the second year running,  Sleeping Trees Theatre Company  have done a similar thing and put two Christmas stories together to present their rendition of  Scrooge and the Seven Dwarves , which they are presenting at Theatre 503. This is not your average fringe Christmas show and the show starts with the Sleeping Trees – Joshua George Smith, John Woodburn and James Dunnell-Smith – telling the audience about the scale of the production we are abo...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/151683/review-of-139-copeland-road-a-really-superb-production/ I am really bad with horror stories. I don’t like scary movies and can still remember, and am frightened by the ‘nursery’ rhyme at the end of the first – and best –  Nightmare on Elm Street . My other problem is one of theatrical FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. So, when asked if I fancied going to review an immersive horror show called  139 Copeland Road , I naturally decided to put myself at risk of nightmares and go along to it. 139 Copeland Road  is a real house in South East London where a bad thing happened in 1974 when the occupier Mary Collins and her two children were burned to death in a very unusual house fire. Since then, the property has remained empty and picked up a certain reputation in the neighbourhood for strange phenomena occurring within it. But now, forty-two years after the original fire, a leading psychic is trying to find out if the reputation is des...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/150919/review-sam-shepards-fool-for-love-found111/ Adam Rothenberg and Lydia Wilson – Photo Darren Bell There are times when going to the theatre can be a confusing experience. While a production is engaging and holds the attention, when it finishes, there is a sense of ‘what did I just see’ and you leave the theatre wondering if you had missed something or were maybe not intellectually up to the ideas of the playwright. I mention this, as I encountered this phenomenon last night at the Found111 presentation of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love. In a run down Mojave Desert motel, May (Lydia Wilson) is sat at the end of the bed looking upset and not making eye contact with tall cowboy Eddie (Adam Rothenberg). Eddie is trying to placate May and reassure her that he will not be leaving her again. Not only is he promising her that he will stay but he is trying to convince May that she should move to Wyoming and set up home with him. The two obviously ...