Girls and boys night out

The show runs from next Thursday to June 27, in the Sabai Pavilion, a new venue for 2015, the Vermilion & Cinnabar Car Park in Lord North Street, M40 8AD.

This year’s show includes 16 of Thailand’s most alluring Lady Boys for a record-breaking 17th season blending comedy and chart hits with choreography that makes this one of the country’s favourite touring cabaret attractions.

Creative director Phillip Gandey said he is thrilled to be returning. “Manchester was one of the first cities we took the Lady Boys of Bangkok to after its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and we couldn’t have asked for a better reception.”

This year’s show contains more than 400 specially-designed costumes – everything from fabulous feathers to diamante-draped, designer-inspired couture.

Box office: 0871 705 0705 or www.ladyboysofbangkok.co.uk

There will be a wild west theme at an evening presented by young thespians at Lancaster’s Dukes theatre next Thursday to Saturday.

Desperados will feature three short plays performed by The Dukes Junior Youth Theatre and Playmakers whose ages range from 7-13.

The characters have been created by the children while the plays were written by Joe Eastwood who has recently completed an internship at The Dukes as part of his youth and community work degree at the University of Cumbria.

Director Vicki Ciaputa said: “Westerns are one of my favourite genres and we thought it would be a good theme for this annual production because they always feature goodies and baddies. It’s easy to make them fun.”

Desperados will be performed at The Dukes Centre for Creative Learning.

Box Office: 01524 598500 or www.dukes-lancaster.org

The best short films from the animation festival circuit will be screened at The Dukes in Lancaster for one night only next Wednesday.

This Is Not A Cartoon (15) includes the Oscar-nominated A Simple Life and Don Hertzfeld’s acclaimed World of Tomorrow.

The programme also features the action of Danny Madden’s Confusion Through The Sand, the poignant Coda and the eerie tragedy of Zepo, the nostalgic love story in Mr Plastimime. The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with one of the filmmakers.

Box Office: 01524 598500 or www.dukes-lancaster.org

Olivier Award winner Kathryn Hunter reprises her role as a monkey playing a man in a highly-acclaimed one-woman show at Manchester’s new HOME venue next week

Walter Meierjohann, HOME’s Artistic Director: Theatre, revives his remarkable production of Kafka’s Monkey.

Brutally imprisoned and desperate to escape, the ape-man reveals his rise through the ranks of the beasts to become a master of the ‘civilised world’ – a walking, talking, spitting, smoking, hard-drinking man of the stage.

A Report to an Academy, the story from which Kafka’s Monkey is derived, resembles the author’s Metamorphosis, in which a man transforms himself into a beetle. It is a grotesque, brilliant mixture of absurdity and pain.

Writer Colin Teevan’s adaptation, first seen at the Young Vic in London in March 2009 and again in 2011, reveals a world in which humans seem ape-like, and apes humane.

“I am delighted to give audiences in the north a chance to see Kafka’s Monkey,” says Walter Meierjohann.

“It is productions such as this which define HOME’s artistic approach and ambitions.”

It runs from Wedneday to June 27.

Box office: 0161 200 1500 or www.homemcr.org