News

Midsummer madness!

Last week we broke TF box office records as tickets flew out of the door for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The show has now sold out and continues to receive rave reviews from audience members and critics alike. You can read what all the critics thought in full via the Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory website. Here are some juicy quotes from the most recent ones…

Andrew Hilton directs this play as if it had never been played before: his production has a freshness, a boisterous energy, a tone of loving mockery and a sense of humour that ranges from biting to enchanting…The performances are polished, with a tempo like music, and the actors play together with a sense of intimacy, like a chamber orchestra. John Peter, The Times

Typically, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory find fresh comedy, flesh out oftbypassed characters, revive every breath of life sleeping in the text and celebrate the TF theatre’s intimacy. Steve Wright, Venue

Andrew Hilton, who’s acquiring so many feathers in his cap as artistic director of Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory that he almost resembles a new species, beautifully serves that integral sense of mayhem and dislocation in a production that tips this way and that between perturbing nightmare and aching dream.
Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

Meanwhile, if you’ve been lucky enough to get tickets to the Dream and would like to find out more about how Andrew Hilton et al created such a cracking production, you may be interested in coming along to the Lunchtime Talk on Saturday 13 March, where Andrew and members of the cast will be talking about how the show was made and looking at key scenes. Tickets include a buffet lunch and further details can be found here.

Meanwhile, down at the Brewery…

...we welcome acclaimed actor George Dillon with his hit one-man show The Man Who Was Hamlet. 

Despite 400 years of research, not a single piece of evidence has been found to directly connect an uneducated untravelled grain-merchant from Stratford with the authorship of the works attributed to ‘William Shake-speare’.  Early last century a disgraced aristocrat was ‘discovered’ to be the true author and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is now regarded as the leading alternative candidate. In this absorbing and entertaining solo perfromance, the Danish prince’s dying words summon Edward de Vere,17th Earl of Oxford, from hell to tell his own Tragical Comical Romantic and utterly scandalous History - to restore his wounded name and triumph over Time.

It’s easy to see why Dillon’s performances have made him the toast of the Edinburgh Festival…  This was pared-down, intimate theatre demanding sheer bravery on the part of the actor, who takes the stage, armed with nothing more than a skull, a rapier and a virtuoso display of dramatic range.
British Theatre Guide