#colin simmonds

SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Tuesday 23rdJune 2026 First produced in 1773, Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy has become a classic, a staple of British theatre.  This year’s summer touring production by the Crescent is a sterling attempt to bring the show to accessible life. Director Michael Barry strips the scenery to a minimum, as befits a production touring a range of outdoor…

MACBETH Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Saturday 8thNovember 2025 Director Colin Simmonds waxes lyrical in his programme notes about German Expressionism of the 1920s and how this influenced his choices in staging this play.  You can see his point: Macbeth himself verbalises his psychological problems, and so Expressionism, where the external world expresses the internal life of the protagonist,…

MURDER ON THE NILE The Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Tuesday 8th April 2025 Hang about – isn’t it called Death on the Nile?  Well, that was the title of the novel, but when Agatha Christie came to adapt it for the stage a few years after publication, she altered the title to reflect changes she had made, chief of which was the substitution of Hercule Poirot for a cleric.  Later, she was to…

HOUSE and GARDEN The Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Saturday 3rd/Sunday 4th February 2024 That ever-ambitious lot at the Crescent have chosen to mark the theatre’s centenary by staging Alan Ayckbourn’s double-bill, where two plays run simultaneously, one on the main stage and the other in the studio, but (here’s the rub) there is only one cast between the two.  When someone leaves the house,…

CLYBOURNE PARK Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Tuesday 12th July 2022 Bruce Norris’s award-winning piece is a play of two halves.  Set in the same house, acts one and two are fifty years apart, with two sets of characters.  We begin in 1959, and Russ and Bev are packing up to move out.  There is a kind of cosy sit-com banter between them, but soon a thread of darkness is revealed.  Their lives…

PRESSURE

Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Sunday 20th October, 2019

  David Haig’s play is set the weekend before D-Day – a date enshrined in history, but of course, at the time they didn’t know exactly when the Normandy invasion would take place.  And that’s the crux of the plot.  General Eisenhower is relying on weather forecasts to predict the best conditions for making his move and sending…

THE GRADUATE

The Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, Sunday 6th September, 2015

  We are accustomed to seeing films adapted into stage shows these days, usually as musicals. Here, adaptor Terry Johnson turns the iconic film of the swinging 60s into a thoroughly enjoyable comedy of sexual mores.

Fresh out of college, Benjamin Braddock lacks direction in life. An encounter with the wife of his father’s…