Theatre review: Unicorn

I usually tend to catch shows pretty soon after press night but it's taken me until midway through the run to get round to Mike Bartlett's latest, Unicorn; it's interesting timing though as one of its stars, Erin Doherty, is currently having a bit of a moment thanks to her role in Adolescence, and everyone's interest in her sandwich. Here she plays Kate, a postgraduate student with a bit of a crush on her former tutor, Polly* (Future Dame Nicola Walker,) who's also one of her favourite poets. We meet them having drinks on what is sort of a date, but a bit more complicated: Polly is married to Nick (Stephen Mangan,) still very happily, but they'd both admit their sex life has tailed off. Polly is attracted to Kate but isn't looking for an affair behind her husband's back: Instead she wants to propose that the younger woman join them as a third in the relationship.

Stage-to-screen review: Death of England: Closing Time

The show I was due to see tonight got cancelled at the last minute, so I replaced it with another show that I'd missed the first time, and that I'd been keeping in my back pocket for just such an occasion: I had a ticket to Death of England: Closing Time's premiere at the Dorfman in 2023, but my performance got cancelled when Jo Martin fell ill. I wasn't too worried about missing the latest part of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' increasingly epic project as I knew it would turn up on NTatHome sooner or later, which it now has: It played in rep as part of a trilogy (the made-for-TV Face to Face seems to have been quietly forgotten) that played in rep last year at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's working on a gag about what "Zig-A-Zig-Ah" means that it'll find a punchline for any day now.

Stage-to-screen review: Crave

With Crave I've now seen all of Sarah Kane's inevitably small canon of theatrical work; originally premiered under a pseudonym to avoid being judged on the playwright's notoriety, her penultimate play marks a shift of direction into a more abstract poetic style. It famously has no stage directions and the characters are lettered rather than named, leaving it up to the actors and director to find characters in the stream of words (by the time of her de facto suicide note 4:48 Psychosis, Kane had also dispensed with telling us which character says which line, or indeed how many characters there are.) It's a piece that defies an easy summary of what it's about, although like its successor it's built on despair - though rather than that wider existential horror this is more specifically rooted in having despaired of love. There's a failed relationship at the heart of Crave, an intense and highly sexual one and almost certainly abusive to some degree, although whether this is the voice of the abused or the abuser is as fluid as anything else here.

Theatre review: The Divide

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: A combination of major changes since the play was premiered last year, and this London run being very short, means The Divide is in the unusual situation of its entire Old Vic run being technically classed as previews.

Alan Ayckbourn's latest play is certainly ambitious, something that's given it a chequered history at the Old Vic even before it arrived there: The Divide premiered at last year's Edinburgh Festival as a two-part event along the lines of Angels in America or Harry Potter, and went on sale in London as two parts as well. But the unimpressed reception it received in August meant that, in the months before it resurfaced, Annabel Bolton's production underwent major changes, notably cutting two of its six hours, now fitting into one (very long) performance. One of Ayckbourn's occasional moves away from comedies of manners towards science fiction, the play has the feel of a dystopian YA novel, albeit one very low on action. The Divide takes place at some point in the future, the world having undergone an apocalyptic event that's reset the calendars - we're now over a hundred years AP, or "After Plague."

Theatre review: Wish List

For the second year the Royal Court partners with the Royal Exchange in Manchester to stage a Bruntwood Prize winner, and following last year's Yen there's another kitchen sink drama looking at an easily ignored class, whose every last lifeline the current government's all too gleefully eager to cut. Tamsin (Erin Doherty) and her brother Dean (Joseph Quinn) had fairly promising and ordinary lives ahead of them until their mother's death, which led Tamsin to neglect her education and Dean's mild OCD to turn into a completely debilitating condition: He's fixated with all food and drink being scalding hot and has a system of knocking on wood to get him through the day, but his most obsessive ritual is constantly washing and styling his hair. He can barely dress himself let alone work, so it's down to Tamsin to support them both (their father is never mentioned,) but with no qualifications all she can find is a zero-hours contract packing goods for NOT AMAZON DEFINITELY NOT AMAZON.

Theatre review: The Glass Menagerie (Headlong)

Tennessee Williams' early masterpiece The Glass Menagerie has suddenly proved popular for fresh interpretation; the production in Southampton was a bit too far for me, but Headlong's tour includes a stop at Richmond, which is certainly doable, especially when it's an adventurous company taking on one of my favourite playwrights. Ellen McDougall's production is very much stripped down - not in the way that its star Greta Scacchi used to be best known for but in a way that, like so much else in the last 18 months, wears an Ivo van Hove influence on its sleeve. Fly Davis' set is a black box, bare except for a staircase, a couple of lamps and a single snowglobe representing the collection of glass animals that gives the play its title. But this isn't too far a departure from what's intended, as the prologue informs us this is a memory play where everything is a bit hidden in shadow and fuzzy around the edges, its narrator - an obvious stand-in for Williams in this autobiographical work - an unreliable one.