#IndieLitMagGala 2025 Spotlight: ALOCASIA Journal
Alan Parry
October 13, 2025
There’s something rare and steady about a journal that knows exactly what it is—and makes no apologies for it. ALOCASIA is one
Some shows whisper back into town. This one kicks the door in with a martini and a sharp tongue.
Michèle Martin—sharp-eyed director, history hound, and the kind of artist who doesn’t miss a trick—returns to Southport Dramatic Club to resurrect Noël Coward’s Private Lives. If you caught her handling Pressure last season, you’ll know she doesn’t deal in soft-focus sentiment. She digs out the meat, the music, the mess. No wonder the NODA crowd came knocking.
This time, she’s not just tackling Coward’s champagne-drenched classic—she’s bringing the gang back together.
Set in 1930s Paris but pulsing with the kind of emotional violence that never dates, Private Lives throws divorced couple Elyot and Amanda back into each other’s orbit—by way of a honeymoon, two new spouses, and one very thin hotel wall.
What follows? Elegant chaos. Velvet vitriol. Lust, rage and snappy repartee. Coward wrote it in four days while convalescing—proof that even his flu had better rhythm than most playwrights’ best efforts.
It’s brittle, brutal, and deeply funny. A proper slap of theatre. And in Martin’s hands, it’s not just revived—it’s weaponised.
Mike Yates and Sandra Unsworth don’t just play Elyot and Amanda. They know them. They wore these roles back in 1996 and, like the best kind of ghosts, they’ve come back with more edge, more bite, more history under their belts. They lit up last year’s The Actress with their chemistry—now they’re about to torch the stage.
They’re joined by three SDC veterans who know how to hold their own in the blast zone:
Fun fact: when Mike and Sandra first played this pairing in ’96, Martin herself was Louise. That’s the level of history we’re dealing with here—this production runs on lived-in rhythm and creative shorthand. No forced chemistry, no first-night nerves. Just real, seasoned talent doing what they do best.
All shows at the Southport Little Theatre, Hoghton Street.
Tickets? £11–£13. Discounts for students and group bookings.
Book online 24/7, or swing by the box office:
📍 11am–1pm daily (except Sunday)
📞 Or call: 01704 530521
Evening box office opens 90 mins before curtain.
Because this isn’t just another dusty classic trotted out for a polite chuckle. This is theatre done properly: clever, sharp, a little dangerous. Every ticket you buy keeps this art deco gem of a theatre alive. Keeps stories on stage instead of screens. Keeps the community kicking.
Coward would’ve raised a glass to that. Maybe even smashed it afterwards.
There’s something rare and steady about a journal that knows exactly what it is—and makes no apologies for it. ALOCASIA is one
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.