Cultural Capital: Theatre

Banner Theatre's 1 May Band perform a number from their new show, Cabaret Against the Cuts, on a visit to Chelmsford TUC. Banner has been performing community theatre for over 35 years but now face the withdrawal of their Arts Council grant. See www.bannertheatre.co.uk

Michael Chanan is professor of film at Roehampton University. His video blog documents the emerging anti-cuts movement and will lead to ... read more

Variety, as we all know, is the spice of life, and it seems our appetite for it has been pretty constant since the days of the Strong Man and the Bearded Lady. London's South Bank is currently hosting a new big top incarnation in the form of a beautiful art nouveau mirror tent, home to La Soirée's shiny sideshow collection over Christmas.

This is old tricks skilfully rebranded for a metropolitan ... read more

The Bloomfield allotments in Bear Flats, Bath are the site of Kilter theatre company's latest outdoor "tale of love and vegetables", an examination of our relationship with food as we move towards post-oil times. I wondered what sort of a place it was. "Nappy Valley," answered my companion crisply.

Perhaps, then, Kilter was preaching to the card-carrying converted -- the yummy mummies on-message with organics who ... read more

Cultural snobs might think that Lewisham and Shakespeare make queer bedfellows: more a case of what blighter through yonder window breaks. But here I am, in an overlit and underheated Sainsbury's in south London, waiting for the Bard's appearance.

It's Sunday afternoon, the store thrums with herds of shoppers, and the Tannoy periodically broadcasts its workaday requests, summoning the supervisor to till number five and so on. Unexpectedly this shifts to ... read more

Fond as I am of London's Barbican Centre, I can never seem to find my way out, or indeed sometimes the way in. So it was with some misgivings that I signed up to non zero one's site-specific performance Would Like to Meet, which requires some guided wandering around the dreaded Labyrinth. In truth this is not, strictly speaking, the ... read more

Hoodie with a heart, tart with same, and plucky granny: at first glance the character list of Mrs Reynolds and the Ruffian is pretty standard issue. That said, Gary Owen's new urban fable for the Watford Palace does have a rather winsome combination of grit and charm.

It's a homily on the hot potato of youth delinquency in "Brown's Britain", and in particular the strategy of ... read more

Ah, Paris! The city where the size of your dog is inversely proportionate to the size of your purse. Le Marais, (or "swamp") where I dipped in my sample jar to check out the state of fringe theatre, is very much a district of the small dog. And yet, its medieval streets have a strong tradition of outsider status -- and were hence overlooked by the zealous boulevard builders -- ... read more

Theatre is a happily apt mode for examining the rise and fall of Enron. Actors are a dissembling bunch by trade, and the smoke and mirrors, legerdemain and suspension of disbelief required to conjure worlds onstage, sit remarkably close to the conning and gulling that Enron carried out to sell an illusion to the world at large. Enron's financial hubris has been well documented: suffice to say that the ... read more

Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen pair up as Amanda and Elyot, the lovers who love and hate each other in equal measure, in Noël Coward's Private Lives at the Vaudeville Theatre in London. Undoubtedly the screen stars were there to lure the punters, but it is a testament to the skill of these performers that they shake free of past roles that could have dogged him and her ... read more

11 and 12 is Peter Brook's latest transfer to the Barbican from his Paris theatre, the Bouffes du Nord. The cryptic title refers to real events in French colonial Mali some 80 years ago. The events were documented by the Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, and his work has been adapted for this stage production by Marie-Hélène Estienne.

In 1930s West Africa, the ciphers 11 and 12 came to ... read more

Benedict Nightingale's tenure as theatre critic for the Times is to end in June, after 20 years. But his role as a critic stretches back further than that -- he wrote for the New Statesman from 1968-86, a crucial period for British theatre that saw an explosion in fringe companies, playwrights and performance spaces.

Among the shows he would review over the course of 18 years was Martin Sherman's ... read more

Just over 400 years ago this week, Ben Jonson, John Marston and George Chapman presented their play Eastward Ho, a scandalous satire about two London apprentices, to King James I. The protagonists were hard-working and sensible Golding and the recklessly ambitious Quicksilver.

Golding marries the equally temperate Mildred, while her vain sister, Gertrude, is won over by the false promises of the penniless Sir Petronel Flash. He and Quicksilver ... read more