As a performance in Bingley’s Myrtle Park, Brighter Still marks both the longest night of the year and the culmination of ...

As we approach the end of 2025, we’re looking back at the things that have brought us immense comfort during the year. For the team at Northern Soul, books were once again a source of great joy, and ...

Lost Souls, the debut album by Cheshire trio Doves, was released 25 years ago. That quarter of a century has been a hell of a ride for the band, made up of brothers Andy and Jez Williams and frontman ...

If you want to understand how adventurous and abstract theatre can be, watch a children’s show. Children are the most honest audience you’ll ever sit among. Rarely will you hear one lean over and ...

Contemporary art sits between two forms of repetition. One is the tired canon that keeps circling familiar movements, the other is the endless stream of algorithmic images that look perfect but feel ...

We are now in peak panto time, so Sergei Prokoviev’s L’Amour des Trois Oranges (The Love for Three Oranges) is a ripe choice for the RNCM’s winter opera offering. This is parody: comic stuff with ...

As December devours the daylight, it’s hard to avoid the winter skies. In the twinkling between dawn and dusk, their restless moods shift from eggshell expansiveness to concrete introspection, hemmed ...

Over this festive season, the theatre scene is awash with big, glittering shows full of singalongs, dancing, hilarious cross-dressing, and half-remembered TV actors. That’s all fine family friendly ...

It’s a children’s animation and story book about a burnt-out Santa Claus with a drink problem. At Sale Waterside, this production of Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas translates perfectly to the stage.

Every Christmas, a small theatrical miracle takes place in Oldham thanks to the local youth theatre, Oldham Theatre Workshop. ‘Oh,’ you might think. ‘A youth theatre? How nice, but really?’ But the ...

As I explain the plot of The Pied Piper of Hamelin to my 13-year-old niece, I watch her expression turn to horror. “Well, there’s this piper who is asked to rid a town of a rat infestation. He plays ...

I haven’t been to a pantomime since I was a child. As it turns out, pantos are much more enjoyable when you’re old enough to understand the jokes. In the return of Manchester’s Opera House panto, ...