Review: Once Upon A Time In Wigan Play - Edinburgh 2016

2 hours ago, soul source said:

Article Highlight:

The Edinburgh Reporter recently featured a review of The Edinburgh University Theatre Company’s recent production of the play...

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Best just to ignore dire attempts at ruining a classic piece. They will keep attempting to do it as the playwright hasn't written a decent play since I commissioned the original 'Once Upon A Time In Wigan' in 2003 (a script that was created through an intense collaborative process between the actors, me and the writer) . Since then the script has been watered down, bastardised, hacked and sold to any fool to put on. No care, soul, theatrical or life experience of the reality for them to use as none of them were there. Its similar to what Binstanley has done to any semblance of respect for those great nights once had at Wigan, by turning them into a four decade long marketing and commercialising strategy. The play now resembles the tea towels, mugs and cheap merchandise that has informs the re-constrution of a tourist orientated simulacrum of Northern Soul.

 

here's another review of it, as you can read this one is a bit different than the above one

 

Once Upon a Time in Wigan
BY HEATHER MCCOMB •   NOVEMBER 2, 2016

 

You will be hard pressed to find another representation so thoroughly transporting and consuming as Once Upon a Time in Wigan, an homage to the cult of Northern soul that swept up youth across the north of England in the 70s and early 80s.

Rarely is a play so completely immersive, so evocative of the culture it is trying to recreate, so meticulous in its pledge to accurately depict a unique slice of history, and the result is repulsively beautiful.

From drug-addled rants on Native American tribes, to the power of Northern soul

full review via...

https://www.studentnewspaper.org/once-upon-a-time-in-wigan/

6 hours ago, mike said:

 

here's another review of it, as you can read this one is a bit different than the above one

 

Once Upon a Time in Wigan
BY HEATHER MCCOMB •   NOVEMBER 2, 2016

 

You will be hard pressed to find another representation so thoroughly transporting and consuming as Once Upon a Time in Wigan, an homage to the cult of Northern soul that swept up youth across the north of England in the 70s and early 80s.

Rarely is a play so completely immersive, so evocative of the culture it is trying to recreate, so meticulous in its pledge to accurately depict a unique slice of history, and the result is repulsively beautiful.

From drug-addled rants on Native American tribes, to the power of Northern soul

full review via...

https://www.studentnewspaper.org/once-upon-a-time-in-wigan/

Yes, the student newspaper.......so to give an idea of their research here. Mick Martin never went to Wigan, was never, and is not, a soulie, knows nothing of the music, and I took him to his first nighter in 1986. Yet  they write -  "As well as portraying a lasting tribute to the cult of Northern soul, writer Mick Martin, a Wigan Casino veteran himself, seeks to explore the ideals of liberation and escape embodied in soul music."