Theatre in the North
Creative TouristTheatre this season splits cleanly in two. December leans into mischief and escape – family shows, festive drag and camp reinventions of familiar stories. That takes in A Christmas Fair at Chadderton Town Hall, Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch at Lowry, and Bolton Octagon’s double header of A Christmas Carol and Mrs Claus Saves Christmas.
Then the calendar turns. January and beyond brings less tinsel, more teeth – solo portraits of radical lives, testimony-driven storytelling shaped by real experience, and big productions that stare hard at injustice, power and responsibility.
Mark Farrelly’s Jarman brings Derek Jarman’s uncompromising life and ideas to Hope Mill, while A Grain of Sand at Leeds Playhouse uses testimony from children in Gaza to insist on the political power of listening. I, Daniel Blake returns to HOME nearly a decade on, a reminder that the story Ken Loach told never became history. Bolton Octagon’s The Memory of Water turns to family, grief and the stories we inherit, while The Fire Raisers arrives at Hope Mill with Max Frisch’s darkly comic warning about complacency and moral collapse.
