Theatre review: Fucking Men

A big fringe hit a few years back, Joe DiPietro's Fucking Men is a take on Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, the controversial 1920 play about a series of one-night stands that form a circle of people who find different kinds of comfort or release in sex. I don't think DiPietro's is the only version to have ever made the leap of adapting the story for gay characters, but it seems to have been by far the most successful. Past productions have been quite luxurious in their casting, with a different actor playing each of the ten characters, but some things have changed since 2008, including fringe venues' attitudes towards actually paying actors, so for Steve Kunis' revival at Waterloo East we get a cast of four, taking two or three parts each. Alex Britt, Charlie Condou, Derek Mitchell and Stanton Plummer-Cambridge are the cast taking on a series of variously sexy, funny and sad scenes.

Theatre review: The Doctor

When an Artistic Director leaves their theatre, their final production is generally made a big deal of. Less so in the slightly more nebulous role of Associate Director, but Robert Icke’s time at the Almeida has seen him shoot up to superstar director status, so his last time in this particular role has been worthy of much comment. As with many of his biggest hits at this theatre, The Doctor sees Icke do his own radical rewrite of a European classic, and after more famous works like the Oresteia, Mary Stuart and Uncle Vanya, he bows out with a more obscure work, Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi. It’s not one I’d heard of before but apparently it’s a classic clash between science and medicine, Christian and Jew; in Icke’s hands it becomes a clash between much more – and so much more than we can even see. Ruth Wolff (Juliet Stevenson) is founder and head of a private hospital specialising in dementia research, and a familiar figure from medical dramas – the brilliant but not-particularly-likeable, abrupt and no-nonsense surgeon.

Theatre review: Fucking Men

The King's Head revives their biggest hit of recent years, Fucking Men, in a new production by Geoffrey Hyland. Of course if the sweary title - evidently a theme this year - isn't enough to draw the crowds in, maybe writer Joe DiPietro's higher profile, with Memphis still a hit, can only help. The inspiration is Arthur Schnitzler's much-adapted La Ronde, which follows men and women in a series of sexual encounters that eventually form a circle. DiPietro's is an all-gay millennial take on the story, each scene taking place before and after a sexual encounter between two men, one of whom will move on to the next one. So we open with the Soldier (Harper James,) who's heard of a rent-boy who hangs out by the barracks. Protesting his heterosexuality and masculinity all the time, he pays for his first blow job from a man.