The adaptation, originally commissioned by Watermill Theatre in 2011 is impressively faithful to the novel. Only a few minor characters, subplots and digressions are missing and some of the dialogue is straight off the page – Dickens was himself was a theatrical chap after all. Between them cast members play dozens of roles on and off a long grey stone platform with South Playhouse’s large space configured in traverse format.

As Pip, Joseph Payne takes his character from frightened child to a stunned legatee and then to a deeply troubled adult. The development is as moving as it is intelligent.

Tiwalade Ibirogba-Olulode is glitteringly good as Miss Havisham. She’s one of those rare actors who can command attention and establish stage presence with voice, manner and timing alone although she also looks dramatically arresting in her yellowing, lace, hooped wedding dress.

Then there are the smaller roles of which most of the ensemble play several. Jamie Foulkes, for example, does a very entertaining comic turn as the sycophantic, self-important Pumblechook. Ella Dacres finds a beautiful still kindness in Biddy and Guy Clark’s supercilious, disdainful Jaggers is spot on. What an inspired idea, too, to rework Mr Wopsle as a tiresome evangelist. It isn’t very Victorian but Sarah Lusack makes it sparky and funny.

NYT rep company is a training group convened (from around 500 applicants) annually from its membership. This 2019 cohort impresses and I look forward to seeing the other work in this year’s cohort.

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I have rarely seen a play as beautifully lit as this one and at least one of those four stars is for Neil Austin’s lighting designs. The backdrop is flushed pink and when characters emerge out of the darkness at the back of the stage they are bathed in light from which they gradually emerge as they advance downstage. It is an extraordinarily realistic represention of a dark rural landscape and way it is lights at night when people move about in it.

Translations is, probably Brian Friel’s best-known play not least because it has long been a favourite in both English and Drama secondary school exam courses. Here director Ian Rickson and his strong cast make sure we think carefully about every word in the play and of course it’s a wordy piece about words – and language and culture and the intricate relation between them.

We are in 1830s Ireland where the British army, assisted by local civilians are drawing up an Ordnance Survey map, clumsily “anglicising” the place names as they go. Education is a major theme. Local people choose to attend Hedge Schools, effectively evening classes run by a teacher in his own home – one of which provides the play’s setting but change is underway and National Schools are opening nearby. Few of the local people speak any English but because of the teacher, his son and an eccentric local bard they are well versed in Latin and Greek.

Fra Fee is outstanding as Owen, the teacher’s son who returns home after six years and is now working on the OS project. He translates – or rather summarises and reinteprets – between the army officers and the locals. Since the play is actually in English the cast have to make it clear when to assume they’re speaking Irish which works perfectly well and makes for some good comic moments. Fra Fee is very naturalistic and convincing.

There’s a fine performance too from Liadan Dunlea, making her professional debut, as Sarah who cannot speak but is beginning, with help, to overcome her muteness. She uses facial expression and gesture very adeptly.

Dermot Crowley as Jimmy, the drunken but cerebral bard, and Ciaran Hinds as Hugh, the elderly teacher, work beautifully together especially in the final scene when Hinds is high on steps at the side and Crowley slumped centre stage ruminating, crazily, on his forthcoming marriage to Athene. And we are left reflecting on colonial arrogance along with the way language unites and divides people.

A scene from Translations by Brian Friel foreground Ciarán Hinds, Julian Moore-Cook. Photo: Catherine Ashmore

Heard delights as the attractively sweet but strong Julia. Her singing soars, her intonation is impeccable and she acts with total conviction. Stacey is more than competent especially in his deliberately silly numbers when his character is sending up both himself and his profession. The two work well together, moreover, and there are some well sung duets.

Carly Caller, who has a fine “full belt” when she needs it, is feisty and witty as Holly. Tonia Plowman has, and is, fun as Grandma Rosie especially in her rap number.

Although I think this piece, with its mostly samey music and songs which don’t add much, is weak and in many ways not a good choice (it attracted a pretty sparse audience on the opening night when I saw it) there are advantages for a large amateur company in a show which is predicated on a series of weddings and other parties. It means that there is plenty for the ensemble to do and scope to use people of all ages, sizes and shapes: wedding guests just as they are in real life. And I like that inclusiveness.

The ensemble is well directed too. Rachel Ann-Crane Herbert knows how to use every cast member to pleasing effect although the scene changes could be slicker. There is too much reliance on traditional stage hands when it would often be smoother and more seamless simply to get cast members to bring items on with them as they come. Choreography (by Emma Constantine and Bethany Kember) is sparky and makes imaginative use of both the abilities of the cast and the Central Theatre space.

The 1980s costumes – lots of changes for ensemble members some of whom play a whole series of roles – are delightfully brash, bold and colourfully in period. Jo Kember and Julie Smith have done a fine job with them. Where can I buy that green dress and matching handbag?

Full marks too to Musical Director, Owen McColgan and his fine ten piece band, positioned conventionally between the front row and the stage – there is no pit at Central Theatre. One of the very best moments of the evening is the Klezmer number in the Bar Mitzvah scene with delicious, showpiece clarinet and trumpet work.

Lolita Chakrabarti’s heart hitting debut play is extraordinarily good and although I’d heard and read a great deal about it I had never seen in so I was very keen to see one of the first productions by a non-pro (soon-to-be-pro in this instance) company. And it certainly doesn’t disappoint.

The first play staged at Tricycle Theatre (now The Kiln) by Indhu Rubasingham when she took over as artistic director in 2012, Red Velvet tells the story of free-born black American actor Ira Aldridge (1807-1867). He played major Shakespeare roles across Europe to great acclaim, having crossed the Atlantic during the Civil War but his reception in Britain was mixed. Until the arrival of this play, which won several awards and transferred to the West End, he was a largely forgotten footnote in theatrical history.

Here it’s in the very competent hands of a company of nine third-year Guildhall students directed by Wyn Jones. The stage – swagged in red velvet curtains with a clear demarcation between backstage, on stage and other places in which actors meet – forms a big playing space with the Milton Court Studio configured in an oblique proscenium so that it feels totally in period. Most of the action takes place at Covent Garden, then known as Theatre Royal, with some earlier and later scenes in a theatre in Poland.

Daniel Adeosun as Ira is definitely one to watch. He strides about with dignity, warmth, charisma and articulate intelligence – a better actor, of course, than anyone else in the company Ira is brought into as Othello in 1833 because Edmund Kean is ill. Ira wants to act naturalisitically. The others are hilariously ham and stylised. And most of them resent his colour with bitter, open loathing especially when he wants to touch Desdemona (Sophie Doyle as Ellen – good) on stage. “It’s called acting” he snaps crossly at one point when he’s criticised. Adeosun is one of those actors who lights up the stage and that’s very exciting. It may be an obvious point, but I hope he gets the opportunity to play Othello for real before too long as well as lots of other parts.

The whole company is strong and they work very smoothly together. Martyn Hodge is terrific, for example, as the fraught French producer, Pierre and there’s a delicious performance from David Buttle as the sneering, disdainful, outrageous Bernard Warde.

Lottie Fraser is convincing as Betty Lovell, another actor in the company too trying to be accommodating and swept away by the exotic glamour of working with a black man. I wish though, that she hadn’t also been expected to double as Ira’s wife Margaret. The change of accent wasn’t enough to differentiate the two roles.

The other thing which bothered me slightly was the music we were played as we settled in our seats – rather lovely Mikado arrangements although Aldridge died in 1867 and the Mikado didn’t premiere until 1885. There’s a reference in the play too to anti slavery demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, which suddenly seems very topical, except that we’re in 1833 and Trafalgar Square didn’t open until 1844. These are tiny gripes but they grate once you’ve noticed them.

Generally, though, this is a fine production of an outstanding play and I look forward to seeing a lot more of these promising young actors.

© Guildhall School / Mihaela Bodlovic 2019

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Imagine a white boy growing up in South Africa in the early years of the 20th Century. He’s a bit lonely and confused by the harshness of life around him especially when his father shoots a white lioness. Bertie befriends her orphaned cub, a relationship which triggers a complicated story within a story within a story – a Russian Doll, narrative, as it were. It takes us to a prep school in southern England at three points in the century and to the horror of Northern France in WW1. Also woven in is a beautiful love story, alongside the central leonine friendship.

Dale Rooks, who runs Chichester’s excellent Learning and Participation Programme, is a stunningly good director and she squeezes every ounce of magic, emotion and delight from Anna Ledwich’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel using a large, talented cast of adults and children.

Nicola Sloane is warm and engaging as Old Millie, who is telling the story of her late husband and his lion to a young Michael Morpugo who has fled from his loathed prep school. She finds a very charismatic depth of wisdom in the character. Claudia Jolly plays the younger Millie with the same feisty warmth both when, for instance, she’s working in a field hospital and when she’s back home with Bertie.

I liked Jonathan Dryden Taylor’s work as the adult Michael Morpurgo, returning to his old school as a troubled, thoughtful famous author and doubling as dapper French circus owner Monsieur, later a pitiful, war-broken old man.

This is epic drama ranging over many issues including the inevitability of death. There’s the usual Morpurgo pacifism, concern for animals, empathy with children totally misunderstood by adults set in a sweep across more than a century. And we are invited continually to reflect on story telling and how it works. Simon Higlett’s set and Johanna Town’s lighting support all of this admirably especially when shapes and colours emerge on the floor like one of those old fashioned painting books when you simply stroked a bit of water on to the page to bring out the images. It’s a show full of theatrical surprises.

And there’s puppetry, of course, Nick Barnes has achieved some lovely things here. There’s one wonderful – not a dry eye in the house – moment when something enters from the rear and we all gasp in wonder but I won’t spoil it for you. There is also a nice dog named Jack who woofs and charges about wagging his tail with great conviction along with hundreds of blue butterflies.

There are some rather fabulous scenes too in which the whole ensemble morphs into a group of African animals. The hippo, the bird, the giraffe and so on grazing or coming to the water hole are all enjoyably recognisable. Physical theatre is yet another element well used in this fine production.

This is the last show in Chichester Festival Theatre’s main 2019 season and its second main season show for family audiences (last year’s The Midnight Gang was the first). The season has been imaginatively varied but I think we really did have to wait to the end for the very best. I’m normally scathing about first night audiences who leap excitedly to their feet at the end of just about anything but on this occasion the standing ovation was richly deserved. The Butterfly Lion has the potential to transfer or tour. Remember where you first read that.

Adam Buchanan (centre) and members of the company in THE BUTTERFLY LION at Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan