Image by Catherine Ashmore

Philip Pullman’s magical story unfolds in a world where young girl Lyra lives in an Oxford very like our own, but strangely different with other people’s souls brought to life as animal companions, known as daemons.

The trilogy has been on my reading ‘to-do’  list for ages now and this has promted me to do so, but I do wish I had read them before finding out about tonight’s ‘Spotlight Special with Philip Pullman’. Catherine Ashmore’s beautiful production images just got uploaded to the REP website, and are definately worth a look.

Transmissions is the Rep’s young (as in 12-26 year old) playwrights’ programme and was started back in 1998.

To celebrate this decade of fantastic new work, we’re staging extracts from plays that were big hits at previous festivals alongside some new commissions that look to the future.

Click for show details and suggested highlights.

The Birmingham REP has a new website. I haven’t had a good dig yet but a cursory glance reveals it to be rather progressive with comments, feeds (RSS and iCal), blog-style news and a snappy design, as you’d expect from a Made Media production given their work on the THSH site last year. In fact comparing the two this appears to raise the bar a bit, which is always good to see. Two thumbs up from me.