Theatre review: Stories

Nina Raine returns to the Dorfman, this time also directing her latest play Stories. It’s named after the idea that there are only seven basic stories in the world, and Anna (Claudie Blakley) seems to go through most of them – mainly the quest - in her attempts to have a baby. After a couple of years of trying with her partner Tom (Sam Troughton,) IVF is the step that makes it feel all too real for him and he breaks up with her. Approaching forty and finding herself single again, Anna becomes all too aware of her biological clock and decides to have the child on her own. She looks into finding a sperm donor online but doesn’t like the anonymity of it, and instead comes up with a plan to find the father herself – never quite giving up on the hope that Tom might change his mind, she nevertheless arranges to meet several men she knows (all also played by Troughton) who she thinks might be suitable candidates.

Theatre review: Once in a Lifetime

It's fair to say my past experience with director Richard Jones' work hasn't been stellar; at least I didn't leave his last three shows at the interval, but that is partly down to the fact that they didn't have intervals. I've liked a couple of his shows though so went along to his return to the Young Vic, and though it's lacking in some crucial ways at least I wasn't tempted to take an early bath. Once in a Lifetime is a product of the ten-year playwrighting partnership of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, who had numerous Broadway hits, in a version restructured for 12 actors by Hart's son Christopher. (Not that 12 is a tiny cast, but it seems as if the original required so many bodies it became prohibitively expensive and nobody wanted to revive it.) It's obvious why extravagance might have been on the playwrights' agenda though as their subject is Hollywood, and the particular excitement after the first talking picture was released in 1927.

Theatre review: The Painkiller

Déjà vu tonight as, only a couple of nights after Miss Atomic Bomb, another show goes through all the motions to make me laugh and fails spectacularly. That show had the word "bomb" right there in the title, just like Francis Veber's The Painkiller has the word "pain" to describe what it'd be like watching it. The fourth show in the SirKenBranCo season (the third was a revival of Red Velvet, which I'd already seen first time round,) Sean Foley adapts and directs a production originally seen in Belfast a few years ago. Alice Power's set is the familiar farce setup of two adjoining hotel rooms, the communicating doors left unlocked because plot. In the room on the left is Ralph (SirKenBran,) a hit-man who's chosen it as the window offers the perfect shot for the assassination he's got planned. Next door is Dudley (Rob Brydon,) in London to try and make up with his estranged wife Michelle (Claudie Blakley.)

Theatre review: Rules for Living

For the final production in Nicholas Hytner's 12 years in charge of the National Theatre, he brings out one of the star directors of his tenure, Marianne Elliott. But in a final season that has brought big-name actors and writers back to the South Bank, it seems a bit surprising that his swansong would be a family comedy - set at Christmas, but premiering in March - by a less well known playwright, in the smallest of the permanent theatres. All becomes clear though on watching Sam Holcroft's high-concept comedy Rules for Living: Hytner wanted to go out with a party. The unseasonal setting isn't distracting as Christmas is just the easiest excuse to bring a family together: Matthew (Miles Jupp) brings his girlfriend Carrie (Maggie Service) to stay at his parents' home for the first time, where they'll be joined by his brother Adam (Stephen Mangan) and his wife Sheena (Claudie Blakley.) Before lunch they'll play an unnecessarily complicated board game, as is the family tradition.

Theatre review: Chimerica

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I really don't remember booking a preview performance for this, but think the press night might have been brought back after I booked; it's now next week.

Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica opens at the Almeida complete with three cast members (Benedict Wong, Andrew Leung and David Tse) from Hampstead's just-ended #aiww¹, and like that play it looks at the rise of China and how the ruling party treats those who don't toe the line. But as the title suggests this time there's two nations being thrown together, and at the heart of Kirkwood's new play is the relationship between China and America, and how the two nations view each other. Spanning 23 years over two continents, and coming in at over three hours, this is an epic in more ways than one. Set during last year's US Presidential election campaign, the action is haunted by the deaths of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and especially by that day's best-known image of a lone man standing in front of a row of advancing tanks.