Theatre review: After the Act

Anti-LGBTQ+ legislation whose phrasing is so vague it seems to have been drafted by people who don't understand any of the words in it may be recent news in the UK, but unfortunately it's hardly without precedent: That sense of déjà vu comes from Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which passed on a wave of "won't somebody think of the children?" moral panic and ended up, in practice, banning teachers from acknowledging to their students that gay people existed, even when those students were clearly dealing with a crisis of their own sexuality. The latest of David Byrne's (not that one) transfers from the New Diorama to the Royal Court deals with Section 28's toxic legacy, but while it's a subject I think is always worth revisiting and educating people on, for me Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens' After the Act, a play with music composed and performed (with Calie Hough) onstage by Frew, feels the strain of expanding to a bigger stage.

Stage-to-screen review: It's True, It's True, It's True - Artemisia on Trial

I think any attempt for me to see It's True, It's True, It's True live is cursed: After hearing nothing but raves for Breach Theatre's show I snuck a performance into a packed schedule when it ran at the New Diorama, only to get bronchitis and have all my theatregoing go out of the window for a few weeks. It recently spent a month available on iPlayer but I didn't watch that because I'd booked to catch its return to London for a run at the Pit; well I was due to have seen it this week, so we all know how that worked out. Now the company have put it online for another month on their YouTube channel, and let's hope finally managing to see it will break the run of bad luck. The title comes from the repeated testimony of 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi (Ellice Stevens) in a rape trial where she was the key witness, but it also describes the piece itself, which Stevens and director Billy Barrett have translated into vernacular modern English from the almost-complete transcripts of the 1612 trial in Rome.