The week in theatre: Angela; The Band Plays On; Hear Me Out reviews – shopping and ducking

Pitlochry Festival theatre; Crucible Sheffield; podcast; all available online
Mark Ravenhill tenderly explores his mother’s life; monologues and music from Sheffield; and actors talk about their favourite speeches

It is a long way from Shopping and F***ing. In 1996 Mark Ravenhill was celebrated and reviled for his rapid, urban scenes, one of which featured oral sex in Harvey Nicks. Now he has written a domestic, autobiographical audio drama that proclaims the importance of Beatrix Potter’s animal tales.

Angela is the first of eight new plays produced by Sound Stage, the audio-digital theatre platform set up by Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum in collaboration with Naked Productions. It is a promising start. A strong cast includes Toby Jones, Pam Ferris and Joseph Millson. Polly Thomas’s direction is decisive: not bombarded with sound effects but inflected by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s music, which falls like a sigh between scenes. Wistfulness and disturbance are intertwined in episodes from the life of the dramatist’s mother.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/39mTPRc