Rose Theatre Kingston

Oof. Theatre’s a risky business. You can assemble the finest ingredients: hilarious actors; witty original songs; a play based on a famous comic novel set on the very Thames by which your theatre, Kingston’s Rose delightfully stands – and still produce a casserole of nonsense. Jerome K Jerome’s gentle book about three Victorian chums who, tiring of the city, take a boat up river to Oxford, is not particularly juicy dramatic material. It’s a pottering, wittering, chuntering sort of comedy; peak excitement occurs when they try and fail to open a tin of pineapple.  Director Christopher Haydon and writer Al Smith raise the stakes and reimagine the midlife mini-break as a stag-do-goes-wrong. The opening scene sets the tone of inexplicable frustration and bewilderment. The gents are, for reasons that are never clear, inside Hampton Court maze, where befuddled bridegroom Harris (Bronté Barbé) and melancholy widower George (Richard David-Caine) have agreed to meet their dodgy friend Jerome (Jonny Weldon). They get lost, argue with umbrellas, and fling fake apples into the audience. Jerome then strongarms them into a surprise week-long boat trip ahead of Harris’ nuptials in Oxford, in which multiple similar scenarios, increasingly unmoored from plausibility, will unravel, with decreasing comic returns. You can’t sustain an entire full-length play on patter, strolling songs and knob gags A high energy farce in the Edwardian, end-of-the-pier style is not an insane direction to take,...

A witch soars across the skies – and picks up a few animal pals along the way – in this adaptation of the best-selling picture book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffer. It's created by Tall Stories, who've created a host of loveable stagings of storybook favourites, and uses their typical combo of sing-a-longs, puppetry, and quirky humour. Ages three-to-eight.