Beyond Our Kennel

John Hegley, performance poet and singer of funny songs - that's somewhat more funny peculiar than funny haha. First half of the show was primarily songs, second half was consumed by an A-Z of animals. Hegley's act is the grouchy science master trying to enthuse the third form into action; his content is mostly from personal experience, drawn from his upbringing in Luton and Bristol, and his relatives in France who always seem to be doing carnivals. The theatre is new, and the seats have precious little legroom; by the end of the show, we were feeling the pinch. Not quite worth the £15 for full-whack tickets, but certainly worth the £12.50 for concessions.

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Circus of Horrors

If Hegley was cereberal entertainment, Circus of Horrors was funny bizarre. It is, we're reliably informed, a steampunk entertainment, presumably differentiated from goth by requiring some movement. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Dr. Haze buying a lunatic asylum to house a burlesque show. It's a convenient hook to bring together some gymnastic, expressive, and magic acts, which get progressively more extreme as the night goes on. There's strong language throughout and some artistic nudity, though nothing gratuitous. Stylistically, it's somewhere in the vicinity of Punchdrunk's Masque of the Red Death, though without the semi-coherent narrative, and with much more of a we're not serious, really glint in the eye. One of our party saw the show five years ago - the cast and script had changed, but not by much. There is surely scope for a site-specific production: a reconstructed House of Fun at Blackpool's Pleasure Beach springs to mind. We paid £15 for mid-auditorium tickets, about right for a theatre show.

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A rap-dance telling of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with a rather decent modernistic gloss. There are young people, making some remarkable moves, somewhere between acrobatics and martial arts. There are old people, replete in oversized papier-mache masks and suits. And there's very little to interrupt the dancers: a cage on the left of the stage, and video projection here and there. Will no-one rid us of anti-social youngsters? asks the leading suit, clearly unaware of what he's asking. Enter, stage right, the pied piper figure, played by Kendrick Sandy. He's also the choreographer for the company, and has given himself some over-indulgent dances. He completes them well, but they do still overshadow the rest of the piece, especially the seemingly endless one with the scarcely-clad women. We particularly liked some of the youngsters: hooded figures, barely visible beyond their white gloves while picking pockets like mosquitos; there were also some bats, swooping and diving with insolence. Many of the youngsters leave with their piper at the end, and we see them with hoods down. Again, a good element slightly spoiled by being so obviously indulgent. Cutting down on the flim-flam, and perhaps adding a stronger narration in the middle bit, would improve this show. It's a good one, and worth the £18 we paid for tickets in the back of the stalls. Also: The Stage, Indytab, Het Graun; touring to Newcastle and Sheffield in late April and early May.

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Last Night of the Spring Proms was an interesting idea, the LCO is touring leading venues in the provinces, playing some uplifting, rabble-rousing, and generally well-known pieces on a Saturday night. The tone was set early, with such lollipops as the overture to Die Fledermaus, La donna e mobile, and the gallop from William Tell all appearing before the interval. There were some more unusual pieces: we never expected to hear Dvorak's Slavonic Dance (aka theme from The Adventure Game series 2) in the same programme as light music by Eric Coates. After the interval, the programme turned that little more rowdy, with the inexplicably popular Funiculi, funicula running on to Those magnificent men in their flying machines, closing with the overture to HMS Pinafore. For this concert, the vocalists were Stephanie Corley (soprano) and John Marshall (tenor), with John Pryce-Jones conducting the orchestra. Everyone knew their place, everyone made their effort, but we found the evening as a whole lacked a certain sparkle. It was music for the big auditorium, played in a big auditorium, and we would not have paid more than £20 for the night.

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In a perfect world, Bat for Lashes would be ubiquitous and no-one would notice. The band makes an ethereal sound, and singer-songwriter Natasha Khan dresses like a fairy aunt: eyeshadow all the colours of the rainbow, and feathers coming off her wispy clothes as she dances in a suitably modern style. There's a proper set of songs in here, little stories that take the listener into Khan's world, ably assisted by the rest of the group (including quondam Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley). It's as if the wispiness of the Cocteau Twins met the plaintive songwriting talent of Stephen "Teatowel" Duffy. Reality intruded from time to time: the tour has been plagued with technical problems, and twice tonight bits of equipment failed to tinkle on command, necessitating fourth-wall-breaking visits from stage techies. That was unfortunate: Symphony Hall is a dreamlike setting for semi-classical concerts like this. The set was short, and perhaps a little too biassed towards the group's latest album. Highlight was the wistful love song Moon and moon, familiar to anyone who's ever tried a long-distance relationship; the whole show gave off warm-and-fuzzies by the bucketload. £20 feels good value.

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Everybody Loves a Winner

The first thing to say about this production is that it's in the Royal Exchange Theatre. We'd not been in it before, and hadn't appreciated the hard work that went into the original building, the construction of the theatre, and its reconstruction. Back in the 1800s, the Exchange Building was the centre of trade for cotton, like the Sock Exchange in That London. It was best to have the trade close to the mills, as communications in the nineteenth century weren't quite as good as they are now. The advent of the telegraph and telephone didn't move the trading floor; what did for it was the death of the cotton mills, and the Exchange closed for business on the last day of 1968. A theatre-in-the-round was constructed, and it opened in the early 1970s. Architectural re-modelling was forced upon the city by Irish Republican critics in 1996, and the net result is a bizarre dichotomy. The Exchange building is a monument to Manchester's nineteenth-century grandeur, all gothic columns and a gorgeous semi-glass roof; in the middle lies a squat metal-and-glass spaceship, with ladders and scaffolding around the sides. These are the access points for the audience upstairs, for the theatre has three levels of seating.

Dotted around the perimeter of the hall are various signs - I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky and Tonight's your lucky night and so on. There are fruit machines outside the main audience entrance, with one out of order. Inside, ushers from the Rex Bingo company (a fictitous one, but clearly an amalgam of elements of other companies) show people to their seats, and the show commences. The staging is about ten rectangular formica tables, with half-a-dozen chairs around the long sides, sometimes one of the chairs is broken and taped off. At the far end from the entrance is a lectern, and behind that are signs for toilets.

It quickly becomes clear that the audience is expected to participate in the play. The manager Linda is deftly played by Sally Lindsay, who some of you will know as Shelley from Coronation Street. We're introduced to her staff: attendants Joe (Warren Sollars), Debbie (Emily Alexander), and Joy (Amanda Henderson), and the caller Frank (Ian Puleston-Davies). Sollars' is a name familiar to this blog from his roles in Eurobeat: Almost Eurovision, and it's no surprise to see him leading the other attendants in some brief song-and-dance routines as the show progresses. Other names in the cast include Sally Banks (as the foul-mouthed Maureen), Judith Barker (the dour Kathy), Sue McCormick (almost unrecognisable as Mandy) and Shery Ormerod (Denise).

Most of the performance is an indirect enquiry into why people play bingo. Linda's character swiftly peers over the fourth wall, Frank batters it by the force of his personality, and by the time the remainder of the cast arrives, there's just a pile of rubble where that wall once stood. We see the dozen-or-so regulars at the bingo, and watch them as they play their game, some of them talking about their lives directly, others indirectly. Later in the first half, the audience is directed to look under their seats, where they find a book of bingo numbers, and one of those felt-tipped dabbers that the cast are using. Within moments, the entire audience is playing along, looking for the number that Frank's just called. This game is quite clearly rigged, so that all the audience is within one or two numbers of claiming a full house, just waiting for the right number to come up. But it never does. Feel the tension. Feel the possibility. Feel the loss as one of the ladies calls house.

The audience is invited to play along after the interval, in a game of real bingo, for real stakes (50 new pence), for real prizes. Someone must win £200 as the first to take a full house. The tension is dragged out by soliloquies, Frank asking us to consider what it is we're doing, the cast explaining what they'd do with the winnings (it's a fridge freezer for our wedding, it's the last win of a trip to see a son in Australia).

We always ask if it was worth it. The play's nominal running time was two-and-a-half hours, including a 20-minute interval. The doors were very late to open, and we reckon the play completed in slightly less than two actual hours. We had no regrets to pay £24 (including the 50p bingo ticket, which really is an integral part of the performance) for seats on the third row back; had we been up in the higher tiers, we would have balked at paying more than half that.

Our favourite part was the use of the players - the actors on the stage, not the 600 people in the audience - as a Greek chorus. They chant lines together, they chant different lines together, they have solo lines in a very tight rhythm. That, alone, we found a highlight, and it's entirely likely that some of the lines will re-emerge in another context. We also liked the fact that the play tells a moral tale without preaching. We found the closing scene, in which Linda rams this argument down Debbie's throat, to be a little over-done. Some of the people we were sitting close to didn't get the message at all, and expected some sort of character development. There is no character development, the cartoon figures we see in the opening half-hour are all we'll get tonight.

The moral is that if you wait for something to turn up, it might, but that you might well be better off pursuing a goal you can reach yourself. There is no excuse for not controlling what is within your control. That, we suggest, is one of the morals on which Manchester was built: self-improvement, building a better spinning machine, carving out a path to the sea rather than waiting for the river to take you there. As well as having a very Manchester moral, the play has Manchester running through its bones: there are innumerable local references (a nice house in Didsbury) that sailed slightly over this blog's head. It's also a play designed for the Royal Exchange Theatre, a theatre in the round, and fiercely in the round, so that there are only five or six rows of seating. It's a steep arena, almost like the Roman gladiator pits.

Bingo as the next gladiators sport? Stranger things have happened...

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There are three methods of reviewing this production. One is to briefly summarise the content in little more than a paragraph. One is to explore the political and philosophical content of Adam Curtis's montage. And one is to recap everything we can remember, in great detail. We're going to do all three. This is the ultra-brief review; the PPE critique and the detailed recap will follow. Readers using screen-readers will wish to note that the warnings contain a spoiler.

It Felt Like a Kiss was the latest work by Punchdrunk. It took as its starting point an assertion by Adam Curtis that the United Stations created a coherent mythology - people would be safe, and free to be individuals - in the late 1950s, and re-built that world. Both the face that the Stations wished to show the world - neat picket fences, tidy houses - and the underbelly they tried to hide, of CIA paranoia, of drug-induced hallucinations, and repression of the negro community. The ambience was astoundingly good, even if some of the tiny details were slightly awry, and the whole experience was as agreeable - if not quite as repeatable - as My So-Called Life. Readers in the UK may see Curtis's montage on his blog; this does contain some spoilers for the show. It has been reported that it will be re-mounted in London later this year, or early in 2010. We would recommend it to anyone who can cope with prolonged periods of semi-darkness and strobe lighting, who is not in any way of a nervous disposition, and (SPOILER: highlight to read) who does not have a phobia of hospitals or chainsaws. We found the production to occupy our mind for weeks afterwards, suggesting £25 is cheap.

(More: Longer review)

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I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Live

We missed ISIHAC's theatre tour in 2007-8, which was doubly unfortunate as it turned out to be Humph's final act with the long-running comedy phenomenon. The show has gone on, with Jack Dee taking the chair, and Rob Brydon the fourth seat on the panel. Even though Rob is the second-best chairman the radio show's ever had, he's even better on the floor. The rounds are familiar games - One Song to the Tune of Another, Cheddar Gorge, Mornington Crescent, Charades, Swanny Kazoo - and sometimes played with material that worked well on the radio some years ago. Such are the perils of BBC7. The high-tech state-of-the-art internet-linked laser display board proved to be in its usual fine form, though Samantha was unable to join us before the end of the show. The only problem with the night (other than it came to an end) is how John Naismith's script hasn't really been adapted for the new hosts. Might it be time to refresh the producer, along with the host?

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Indigo Girls

We were never fans of the Hummingbird (latterly the Birmingham Academy), and boggled slightly when the venue moved to the Dome nightclub at the top of Bristol Street. The new site is still predominently standing, with poor views from the back; the 600 seats offer a decent view. There are more bars and more toilets (and the flexibility to re-designate some of the gents as ladies when needed, such as on this night), and the queue for the bar wasn't too bad - the prices were still sky-high. It's better than it was, though we're still not going to make a habit of going.

But this isn't a venue review, it's a live event review. Support was from Stephanie Dosen, who was quite clearly chanelling Bonnie Langford from her Just William days. It made us thcweam and thcweam. Not our cup of tea at all. Mercifully, the star attraction were stars, playing about two-thirds of their latest album, and a good selection of other popular songs, with the crowd joining in when they knew the words. And, goodness, they're good songs, well-crafted, well-written, in a manner that would quite probably make Russell Davies nod in approval.

Power of two went particularly well, as did Fleet of hope, and the inevitable closer to the twenty-ish song set was Closer to fine. Only the one song on the encore, Galileo. We do reckon a fuller band would have helped the set, there are times when two guitars and a few off-stage keyboards were insufficient, but this is mere detail. The crowd carried the night, and could probably have sung half the concert on their own. Hewing too close to the recordings? Possibly, but the fun is in the communal experience.

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Though the main points are accurate, the following review contains some deliberate (and doubtless some accidental) inaccuracies of detail so as not to spoil the show for anyone who might be yet to see it.

Punchdrunk are to interactive theatre as Take That were to pop music circa 1993: everything they touch turns to gold, they attract a fanatical following, and their works will still look fresh in fifteen years time. Shunt are East 17: there's a lot of raw talent in there, but they've not yet left a lasting classic - reviews of their current project Shunt leave us in mind of such non-classics as Slow it down. Slung Low? The theatrical equivalent of Let Loose: they made one good play, and everything else is remarkably similar.

They Only Come Out at Night is staged in a car park. To be specific, it's staged in a car park underneath the Barbican centre in London, and with most of the lights turned out. Our driving friends tell us there's a certain frisson of nervous tension when in an underground car park, because it's not easy to see around corners. We don't drive ourselves, so we'll take their word for it; we found it to be a dark space, a slightly claustrophobic space, with ceilings lower than a house, but not innately tense.

The viewing arrangements are to go around in groups of three; with a run of three-and-a-half weeks, that works out at about 1000 tickets. As we meet the third member of our party, we're sent into a car, where there's an apology. The show we're about to watch has been cancelled, and instead we'll be taken on a tour of the city. It lasts about 40 seconds, and we're deposited at the entrance to an underground car park, covered with white plastic sheeting. We're issued with head torches, glowsticks and headphones, pointed at one of three trails of salt, and left to get on with it.

Down the corridor, where there are silhouettes behind the plastic, there are burned-out cars and what look like dead bodies littering the place. And through the headphones come two voices, one loud and nasty, one cooler and calmer, both discussing the truth or otherwise of the vampire myth.

And so we go through the world, progressing past the houses of the deceased, meeting (as in actual actors) a few interesting characters. The paths diverge and wind through the sheeting, rejoining at various points. There are ambiguities in the tale - a lecturer tells us he has evidence that vampires are out there, but it's clear he's prepared to kill people - innocent people - to prove his point. From time to time, the trail of salt leads us into a painted circle, where more of the plot is expounded. A rescuer who joins us at the far end of the tunnel, professing that nothing has ever come out of there alive before now; at the other end, the next party sees us melt into the distance.

Shortly after the next circle, there's a shadow touching me from behind, and he's leading me away down my trail into a side-room. He says he's able to offer an antidote to ensure that I'll never become one of them, but wonders if can he trust me. The unspoken question: can I trust him? That he's shifty and evasive and drilling me for information suggests not, and after a few minutes of this he lunges for me, an action to direct me out of the other end.

The trail leads me to a table containing some implements lit under a bright light - a toasting fork, a poker, a block of wood, a bag of runes - and some headphones giving a little more narrative, and a lot of noises. Pick one, take it with me. Then off along the corridor, and meet up with the others; the person we don't know has been given some potato crisps, for some reason she can't explain to us. And then the show continues - there's a really excellent animation sequence while we're hearing the next piece of dialogue, and another survivor returns to us for the last bit of our walk, when there are some horrific visuals. She takes my object and melts into the background just before we're off up another plastic-lined corridor, seemingly identical to the first, but it turns back on itself and we can ever-so-briefly see the final twist.

Good bits? The room with the shadows was a good experience, they could have done a little more with that sort of thing. From other accounts, the vampire bloke seemed to be the best actor in the production by some distance: he was natural at improvisation, the others less so, and the woman who came with us at the end never deviated from her script. Nor did we find out what happened to her: any sort of ending - the hero, the epic failure, even a self-immolation - would have helped. The final twist was cute, possibly too cute, and we had had difficulty squaring it with the rest of the show. Overall, though, we found the production to lack a tremendous scare factor. Lights going on ahead of us meant we were strictly timed through the first third of the play, to move out of sight at exactly the right moment, and the feeling of being on a conveyor belt continued for the rest of the show.

Almost inevitably, we're going to compare this production against It Felt Like a Kiss, and it's lacking. The attention to detail isn't there: where Punchdrunk scoured for real back-issues of the LA Times and actual ephemera from the late 50s, Slung Low seemed to skimp. Why have mumbo-jumbo pseudo-chemical formulae on the walls that don't stand a second's scrutiny, when one can have copies of real or realistic CIA files. Nor were the smells up to it - no fresh mothballs, no hospital sanitiser. Though there wasn't a SPOILER! Oh. us at any stage, the pressure to move at the producer's pace was irresistable.

Why did IFLAK work? Over the space of two or three hours, it created a credible world, one only ever-so-slightly removed from reality; we may have been doubting our sanity by the end, but that was part of the point. TOCOAN is too distant from the real world, and relies on too many clichés. Fake blood, meaningless pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific dialogue all mark this universe as distinct from the outside world, as if the plastic sheet were the portals to a TARDIS machine. Though we went on a physical journey, there was no emotional trip, nothing inside us changed during or after the production. In that, we think show producer Alan Lane has failed in his mission - the story was reasonably clear, but the emotions entirely cloudy.

We remain convinced that where this sort of immersive theatre meets intellectual challenge is a mine to be tapped. What if the objects we found had some use later? What if there was a code to crack, a physical challenge to face, that would bring some difference for the survivor we met, or to our own progress in the play? Why should I bring the toasting fork and not the runes? The atmosphere is almost there, it's calling out for a decent puzzle, a conundrum to draw the audience into the story. Make them listen to every word, because the answer is subliminally contained, as Derren Brown might suggest a giraffe. Draw the audience in, make them - make us - bleed for your play.

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(We failed to review this at the time, and are writing up a token note almost two months later for completeness.)

This show is a jukebox musical comedy set in New Amsterdam in 2030, and very loosely based on Tanz der Vampire. The basic plot: Baron Von Rockula wants a bride to live with him forever. It's set to, and slightly based on, songs by the likes of Meat Loaf, Cher and Alice Cooper. There's some little shoe-horning of songs into the plot, but it's nowhere near as obvious as Mamma Mia! is reputed to be, and - from this 2004 review - has improved a lot with practice. (Other reviews, Somerset 2008, Nottingham 2009.

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• Bat for Lashes, Birmingham: Symphony Hall, 12.04.09, £20
• Hegley, John Beyond Our Kennel, Didcot: Cornerstone, 21.02.09, £12.50
• Haze, Dr., Circus of Horrors, Birmingham: Alexandria, 24.02.09, £15
• Everybody Loves a Winner, Manchester: Royal Exchange Theatre, 18.07.09, £24
• I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Live, Birmingham: Symphony Hall, 28 September, £25
• Indigo Girls, Birmingham: Academy, 27 Oct, £23
• It Felt Like a Kiss, Manchester: Quay House, 19.07.09, £25
• Last Night of the Spring Proms, London Concert Orchestra, Birmingham: Symphony Hall, 28.03.09, £23.50
• Boy Blue Entertainment, Pied Piper, Birmingham: Hippodrome, 20.03.09, £18
• Slung Low, They Only Come Out at Night, London: Barbican, 30.10.09, £17.50
• Vampires Rock, Birmingham: Alexandra Theatre, 06.11.09, £16