Outside of your local theatre’s seasonal programme, there’s always a plethora of local companies mounting productions that can provide you with a highly varied theatre season. One such company that has been making a real name for itself in this sector is Futurist Theatre Productions, who bring musicals and local talent together to create memorable evenings of entertainment. On that note, I was very much looking forward to reviewing their latest production of the smash Broadway hit Avenue Q at Yeadon Town Hall.

In 2016, Red Ladder Theatre Company brought to life a story that took the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Courtyard Theatre, and subsequently stages around the country, by storm. That story, the story of the notoriously outspoken football manager Brian Clough, came in the form of their adaptation of David Peace’s acclaimed novel The Damned United. Now, almost two years later, and after achieving widespread success with their adaptation, Red Ladder have brought the production back to Leeds with a new cast and refreshed staging.

I’m certainly starting to see an increase in the number of ‘pay what you can’ style shows popping up over the Yorkshire region. The term has a much more accessible ring to it than ‘pay what you think’ which forces audiences to quickly formulate a critical opinion with a subsequent monetary value after a show. Yet the ‘pay what you can’ model encourages more of a less critical, community feel amongst an audience, and perhaps places a higher experiential value on the show itself and provides a greater sense of accessibility to audiences. On this note, Common Chorus and Little Mighty’s latest offering, If I Say Jump, uses the latter payment method, and on its current regional tour, offers audiences with an evening of refreshingly simplistic storytelling.

Love has often been the primary thematic centrepiece in Kneehigh Theatre’s work. It is a stimulus that provokes and inspires beautiful conjurations from the whole of their creative team, whether they’re adapting an existing narrative or crafting something new entirely, and when under the masterful direction of Kneehigh’s former Artistic Director Emma Rice, these pieces have always been nothing short of incredible. Rice has always had a gift when it comes to harnessing the vast facets of human experience that stem from love, whether that be with Kneehigh or in her recent creative ventures at Shakespeare’s Globe. On that note, I was very much looking forward to seeing Rice back to directing under Kneehigh’s banner in her latest piece of work.

The West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Every Third Minute Festival, a festival ultimately curated to encourage discussions about living with dementia, is well under way. Just under a week ago the Courtyard Theatre played host to their production of Still Alice, which sensitively brought to life the struggles of being diagnosed with the condition. Continuing in the same thread of the tangibility and power of memory is Theatre Re’s latest show The Nature of Forgetting, devised by the company and conceived and directed by Guillaume Pigé.

What If I Told You is a special piece that will stay with you, not only because of its topical and engaging conversation about its culturally reverberant themes, but because of its joy in igniting conversation and leaving its audiences inspired.

Steadily pacing along during its 90 minute running time, Still Alice is a poignant and unflinching piece of theatre that brings its audience face to face with the reality of living with an incredibly distressing mental illness.

Sebastian Faulks’s 1993 novel Birdsong has long established itself as one of the nation’s favourite books. In recent years it has continued to find success as a stage adaptation, captivating audiences with the story of a soldier’s passionate love affair against all the odds. Adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and directed by Alastair Whatley with Charlotte Peters, I took my seat in the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Quarry Theatre to see the show on its new tour.