Sheridan Smith
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pantomime is one of the great festive traditions and the version of Dick Whittington envisaged by John Bishop in this one-off comedy drama checked off every single one of the clichés. Taking a writer’s credit alongside Jonathan Harvey of Gimme Gimme Gimme fame, the Liverpool comic drew on his experiences on regional stages near the beginning of his showbiz career in pulling together the script.Bishop starred as Lewis Loud, a local radio DJ making his pantomime debut at the Grand Theatre Lancaster as part of a group of characters straight out of central casting. There was soap star Tamsin Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hedda Gabler – the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the “female Hamlet”. We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who recently admitted in an interview that she hadn’t heard of the play before she was asked to take on the lead. It may be a world away from the buxom bar-maids and big-hearted bimbos that have become Smith’s trademark, but the double Olivier Award-winner makes light work of a role that carries the weight of theatre’s greatest actresses.Smaller than almost everyone else on stage, and disappearing into sofas, melting Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Jimmy McGovern’s one-man mission to boost the quota of Scousers seen on the small screen continues in “Stephen’s Story” – the latest bout of button-pushing misery otherwise known as Accused. Seventeen-year-old Stephen Cartwright’s beloved Irish mother is bedridden but this doesn’t stop him table-ending his girlfriend. McGovern and co-writer Danny Brocklehurst thus immediately raise the twin pillars of drama: death and sex.They are embodied – literally – in the pneumatic figure of Charlotte, a palliative care nurse who eases Mrs Cartwright’s passing with morphine and then – with shocking speed Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Tender, funny and overwhelmingly moving, Trevor Nunn’s revival of this 1942 drama by Terence Rattigan – part of the playwright’s centenary-year celebrations – is a masterly piece of theatre. The big box-office draw may be Sienna Miller, but she’s by no means the star of the show: if there is one, it’s Sheridan Smith, whose performance is nothing short of glorious. But this is essentially a shattering ensemble work, in which every detail glows with truth, compassion and humanity, and where every seemingly ordinary second of life in an existence hemmed in by the ever-present threat of death is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Audiences genuinely love Legally Blonde, and all but the most churlish of critics should crack plenty a smile, as well. A feel-good show that - unusually, in my experience - actually does leave you on a high, this stage adaptation of the 2001 Reese Witherspoon film benefits immeasurably from a rapturous star performance from Sheridan Smith as the unlikely heroine of Harvard Law School, Elle Woods. Throw in two terrific supporting turns from Alex Gaumond and Jill Halfpenny and a production that pushes for effect considerably less than it did on Broadway and you've got a Read more ...