Theatre review: Elephants

Another family Christmas on stage can only mean another opportunity to reevaluate your own family Christmas and decide it's not so bad after all. In Elephants we're in the comfortable depths of Middle England, where Sally (Imogen Stubbs) has gone all out to embrace the festive spirit. She and husband Richard (Richard Lintern) have invited friends Valerie (Helen Atkinson Wood) and Dick (Jonathan Guy Lewis) to spend the holiday with them, and as everyone arrives on Christmas Eve the mood is upbeat. But this is forced jollity, as the big blowout is Sally's attempt to deal with a darker fact: This is also the one-year anniversary of the brutal murder of their son Christopher (Adam Buchanan appearing in a dream sequence.) Christopher's ex-girlfriend Jenny (Antonia Thomas) has also been invited to what is planned as one last celebration of his life, but when Sally and Richard's daughter Daisy (Bel Powley) arrives, she has other ideas.

Theatre review: Home

Director Nadia Fall has put together a verbatim play for The Shed, in one of the temporary venue's most successful productions so far. Home is set at Target East, an East London hostel for young people with a pretty bad reputation locally. Through interviews with the people who live and work in a real hostel, Fall attempts not only to highlight it as a place that does important, undervalued work, but also to expose its residents, no matter what their backgrounds, as more than just the uniform mass of feral youth the media portrayed them as around the time of the 2011 riots. Most of the people living in the hostel had been homeless prior to getting their place there; many had fled abusive homes, or been disowned and thrown out by their families, or had brushes with the law, even spent time in prison.