10 First Dates  is a Gooper Dust production, currently making its debut at Etcetera Theatre as part of Women Writers Festival.   Playwright Christine Rose was inspired to write this piece after trading horror stories about dating with her best friend. That was enough information to make me want to see this show, which was being presented as a “polished work in progress”.   Maggie appeared on stage first, preparing to go on a date whilst speaking aloud both to her reflection i

In a recently developed theme for me, Fresh Shoots  is an event I had decided to go along to but was then invited to review, so off I went with a notepad (because, there were snippets of 8 different shows!), and a personal mission to try and get a photo of every cast member.  Sadly, I failed on the photos, so apologies to the casts of the shows for which my reflexes and camera combination didn’t succeed.   This was my first scratch night and I walked towards the Drayton Arms

Children of the Night,  a production by Mad Friday Productions, is written by Danielle Phillips, based on the testimonies of 30 people from Doncaster and billed as a love letter to the working-class cultural pulse of the North. I was invited to review the show at Southwark Playhouse Borough. Lindsay (Danielle Phillips) took us back to 1997, to the day she received her GCSE results and was planning a night out to celebrate. There were absolutely no words of dissuasion about he

Death Belles  is a show that I'd made a note to go and see before I was invited to review it, after reading this description: Death Belles is a gripping quartet of darkly lyrical monologues exploring guilt, secrecy, power and vengeance - stories that are intimate in scale but epic in emotional consequence.  As someone who enjoys short stories and flash fiction this instantly appealed to me.   Written by Annie Power and directed by Penny Gkritzapi, each of the four monologues