Lichfield forest glade transforms into ancient Greece in absurdist take on Shakespeare’s early farcical comedy.

Complex and compelling: Nina Raine’s groundbreaking 2017 play is staged with style and substance at Birmingham’s Crescent Theatre.

Sutton Coldfield’s Town Hall is transformed into the fairytale kingdom of Duloc in Trinity Players’ latest production: a high-energy staging of ‘Shrek the Musical’.

Harvey Fierstein’s feel-good musical comedy returns to the Lichfield Garrick in glitzy high-heeled style.

Musical fable about the ultimate stage mother hits Birmingham in an ambitious production at the Crescent Theatre.

Cole Porter’s musical comedy is a de-lovely delight in Manor Musical Theatre Company’s latest production at Sutton Coldfield Town Hall.

You wait for a performance of Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s clever comedy ‘A Bunch of Amateurs’ to be staged locally and then two productions come along at once. Having very recently reviewed this play at the Highbury Theatre in Sutton Coldfield, I was keen to see what a Lichfield ‘bunch of amateurs’ made of it in their hometown Garrick Theatre.

Rising to the comic challenge under the direction of Robin Lewitt, the Lichfield Players’ production delivers laugh after laugh thanks to a talented cast of amateur actors playing amateur actors very professionally!

Highbury Players’ latest production is a witty and warm-hearted homage to amateur theatre.

Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s ‘A Bunch of Amateurs’ will be most familiar to audiences from the 2008 film starring Burt Reynolds but this is how it should be seen: in a local theatre with a cast of amateur actors playing the amateur actors. It works on so many levels and in this production, directed by Laura McLaurie, makes for an evening full of laughs and clever comedy.

It seems we can’t get enough of Agatha Christie. The ‘Queen of Crime’ continues to excite the public imagination with her stories of murder nearly 50 years after her own death. ‘The Mousetrap’ has been running in the West End since 1952; ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ looks set to run and run at London County Hall; ‘And Then There Were None’ has just finished a UK tour and ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ starts one later this year. Christie is clearly good box office and, in the latest production from Birmingham’s Crescent Theatre, it’s easy to see why.

Billed as ‘for anyone interested in Virginia Woolf, beautiful literature or simply love’, ‘Vita and Virginia’ is a beautifully crafted and performed two-hander which takes us into the heart of the famous ‘Orlando’ author and her 20-year relationship with fellow writer Vita Sackville-West.