Chris Wallis

2 weeks ago | northernsoul.me.uk | Chris Wallis

When I was asked to review the 18th anniversary menu at Vermilion, self-styled as ‘Manchester’s most glamorous restaurant’, I thought two things: (a) after 18 years, why haven’t I heard of it? And (b) given Manchester’s propensity to bling, that’s quite a claim. I set off to investigate. Now I have the answers. I probably hadn’t heard of it because it’s a bit off the beaten track, in an industrial estate in Hulme Hall Lane, not far from the new Co-op Live arena.

2 weeks ago | northernsoul.me.uk | Chris Wallis

Well, that was fun. Emma Rice’s stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 movie from a script by Ernest Lehman is a pleasure from beginning to end. Even more so if you know the movie, because much of the pleasure is in watching how this intrepid team of actors tackle what would seem to be unstageable filmic set pieces. I give you the crop duster plane attack on Cary Grant in the middle of the prairie for one.

2 weeks ago | northernsoul.me.uk | Chris Wallis

The Lowry in Salford Quays is 25-years-old this year. It decided to celebrate its community outreach programme, one of the largest in the country, with a youth theatre production led by Not Too Tame, the Warrington–based company committed to working-class culture created by working-class artists, and ‘a good night out’. And it is a good night out.

2 weeks ago | northernsoul.me.uk | Chris Wallis

This is as fine a production of Krapp’s Last Tape as you are ever likely to see, which is quite a feat when you know it was designed, directed and performed by one person: Gary Oldman. With this new staging, Oldman has come full circle. He began his career at York Theatre Royal in July 1979, just two months after I started my first job as a director there, running the Young People’s Theatre Company.

3 weeks ago | northernsoul.me.uk | Chris Wallis

It’s 1997 and two men meet on a train. A white man and a black man. They drink some beer. Six hours later, towards the end of the journey, the white man tells the black man a story which makes the black man very angry. The black man writes a story about the encounter which is published in The Guardian, and sets him on the road to fame and fortune as a journalist and writer. Some 20 years later the white man turns up unannounced at the black man’s Hampstead house.