Like the opening scene of a movie, Crewe Hall appears in all its magnificence at the end of a long drive between our world and another. We are now part of its history, an old house warmed with ...

You know the kind of thing you’re getting with a Shakespearean comedy. Lovers falling out with each other amid some crossed wires. Someone (usually a hapless male) dressing up in ridiculous fashion.

Relax. You know the song. And you probably know the band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But can you recall who sang lead vocals on the 1984 track? Top pop points if your answer was Holly Johnson, the ...

Words have their own particular architecture. A scaffolding of syntax and a skeleton of grammar that both shapes and constrains the sayable. Dance, by way of contrast, has the facility to slip beyond ...

When Yorkshire-born Kieran Hodgson joined the cast of BBC Scotland’s hit comedy series Two Doors Down, he decided to go “all in” and relocate with his partner to Glasgow. “I haven’t done a show for ...

History is littered with sitcoms transferring unsuccessfully to the stage or film. One of the big problems is that the joke ratio plummets when something that works in a 25-minute format is stretched ...

If the UK ever decides to appoint an Anglo-Scottish mediator (and I think that it should), then look no further than Kieran Hodgson. Big In Scotland, the writer and actor’s latest one-man show, is an ...

When the city’s fluorescence, its frenetic denial of night, has started to lose its fascination, there will always be those who take flight to the imagined countryside. Habituated, however, to their ...

Beyond its spotlight on the first person, autobiography has the power to illuminate more widely, extending in the process an invitation to empathy. Sarah Roberts’ meticulous installation SICK presents ...

It all began with Charlie Williams. Less well remembered these days than some of his peers, the former footballer was, in the early 1970s, Britain’s best-known black stand-up, having been promoted ...

This month, Lincoln has been treated to Scarborough Macabre, an off-season sojourn to the seaside in which artist Melody Phelan-Clark “regurgitates the strange and sinister nature of the British coast ...

It’s certainly easy to see why Boys from the Blackstuff has been adapted for the stage. Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 TV serial made an almighty impact and is still remembered today as a vivid portrait of ...