Theatre review: Oslo

Getting a quick transfer from a hit Broadway run to the West End, J.T. Rogers’ Oslo first spends a couple of weeks at the Lyttelton; Bartlett Sher’s production gets an all-new British cast to tell the behind-the-scenes story of historic Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It’s the early 1990s and Middle East peace talks are dominated by the Americans, who insist on a negotiating style that puts all demands on the table – it’s never yielded results, and attacks continue from both sides. Norwegian sociologist Terje Rød-Larsen (Toby Stephens) believes he’s come up with a better model, based around smaller groups of negotiators getting to know each other as people, and chipping away slowly at concessions. Terje’s wife Mona Juul (Lydia Leonard) works at the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and helps set up a back-channel between senior Israelis and PLO members, behind the Americans’ backs.

Theatre review: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

When I first saw Pedro Almodóvar’s film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown I remember being struck by how overtly theatrical it looked, and how well it would work if put on the stage. But Almodóvar is reluctant to license stage adaptations of his work, and as the film finally comes to the theatre it's in the form of an off-Broadway musical with book by Jeffrey Lane and songs by David Yazbek. Pepa (Tamsin Greig) is an actress most of whose work is in TV commercials, and in dubbing foreign film into Spanish, usually opposite her boyfriend Iván (Jérôme Pradon.) One morning she wakes up to find Iván has dumped her via answerphone message, and suddenly there's a lot she didn't know about him, like the estranged wife Lucia (Haydn Gwynne) who's been in a mental hospital for the last 19 years, and doesn't come across as massively sane even now she's been released.