Theatre review: Dr. Strangelove

Welp, October's been a busy theatrical month for me and certainly one with a certain prevailing tone - the odd dud among a very high rate of great shows, but good or bad there's definitely been a pretty dark side to everything I've seen. Even the funnier shows have had a touch of bleakness to them, so it's fitting that I end on the play with easily the biggest hit rate of laughs this month; but it gets them from the total annihilation of all life on earth. A long-awaited West End event - tickets went on sale over a year in advance - Armando Iannuci and Sean Foley adapt Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan one-upping Peter Sellers in the film by playing all four roles Sellers had originally been slated to play: Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, Major Kong and the titular character, a German scientist who's definitely glad to have changed sides after the War - the fact that his bionic right arm keeps trying to do a Nazi salute is neither here nor there.

Radio review: The Rival

The closing of the theatres for Covid has been compared many times to the Elizabethan closing of the theatres for plague, and I wouldn't be surprised if we get a few plays in the next few years explicitly making the connection and following Shakespeare in that time. But while Jude Cook's radio play The Rival does that, its inspiration is one that's been giving writers and academics food for thought for centuries, most recently in the Globe's hit Emilia: The story of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and the mysterious figures they're dedicated to. The poetry collection starts in workmanlike enough fashion, when Shakespeare (Elliot Barnes-Worrell) is hired by Lord Burghley (Philip Jackson) to write 17 sonnets meant to convince his wealthy ward to marry his granddaughter. They fail completely on that front but the Earl of Southampton, known as Wriothesley (Freddie Fox,) becomes Shakespeare's patron, and when the plague closes the theatres he returns to Wriothesley's home to write the long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Theatre review: The Man in the White Suit

Sean Foley’s comic instincts have never been infallible (remember Ducktastic? I certainly don’t, it closed with unseemly haste before I could see it) but I do seem to be disappointed with his work more often lately. Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense was one of his bigger hits a few years ago, but teaming up again with its star Stephen Mangan hasn’t really recaptured that magic as they bring Roger MacDougall, John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit to the stage. Mangan plays Sidney Stratton, a lab technician at a Lancashire textile mill in the 1950s, who keeps blowing things up in his attempts to create a revolutionary new kind of material. When he gets fired from Corland’s (Ben Deery) factory he wangles his way into rival mill owner Burnley’s (Richard Cordery) lab, where he finally comes up with a fabric that never deteriorates, loses its shape or even gets dirty.

Theatre review: Casa Valentina

If I hadn't seen those fucked polar bears in between, this would make a double bill of Harvey Fierstein shows about cocks in frocks, and while Kinky Boots is the big hitter at the moment, for me the real heart is with Casa Valentina. Fierstein's latest non-musical play, it receives its UK premiere at The Large, with Luke Sheppard returning to direct before he revives In the Heights. It's 1962 in a remote part of New York State's Catskills, where married couple George (Edward Wolstenholme) and Rita (Tamsin Carroll) run a weekend resort that sometimes hosts hunting parties. But their main clientele, and the reason they opened the resort in the first place, is very different: George has another identity as Valentina, and the remote location provides a safe environment for him and other transvestites to dress as women in public without fear or judgement.

Theatre review: A Mad World My Masters

The title feels very familiar to me but apparently A Mad World My Masters' performance history doesn't quite match its fame: Sean Foley's production for the RSC is a rare chance to see Thomas Middleton's Jacobean sex comedy, a play whose relentless series of single and double entendres makes the Carry On films look chaste and reserved. There's two distinct plots: Dick Follywit (Richard Goulding) stands to inherit the fortune of his uncle Sir Bounteous Peersucker (Ian Redford) upon his death. But he's not prepared to wait that long and, with his friends Oboe (Harry McEntire) and Sponger (Ben Deery,) he sets off on a number of ridiculous schemes to part the old fool from his money. Elsewhere, Mr Littledick (Steffan Rhodri) is insanely suspicious of his wife's fidelity - with good reason, as Mrs Littledick (Ellie Beaven) is in lust with Penitent Brothel (John Hopkins,) who's got plots of his own to get her into bed.