Theatre review: Here & Now

The latest group to get the jukebox musical treatment is one that feels inevitable, given the general sense of camp ridiculousness that Pete Waterman's surprisingly enduring manufactured pop quartet plus Lee have always had: Steps are a good match for a genre that's at its best when it doesn't take itself seriously, and Shaun Kitchener's (book) Here & Now gets the tone (mostly) right from the start: Will it, like Viva Forever!, try to emulate Mamma Mia! with a Mediterranean island setting? Nah, we're going down the Pound Shop. Better Best Bargains, a totally unrealistic discount store that has more than two members of staff on duty at any given time, is where Caz (Lara Denning) has worked for 25 years without a promotion or pay raise, but she's still pretty chipper about the place because she's friends with her co-workers, and they all introduce the week's new special offers by dressing up as condiments and singing "Five, Six, Seven, Eight."

Theatre review: The Night of the Iguana

The latest Tennessee Williams revival features many characteristic elements from his most famous work, but also feels like a departure that hints at the more experimental phase he went into later in his career: Set in 1940 in a ramshackle, inaccessible Mexican hotel at the edge of the rainforest, The Night of the Iguana is a melodrama touching on a number of characters, but predominantly focusing on a trio of Americans: The Rev T. Lawrence Shannon (Clive Owen) is an alcoholic, not-technically-defrocked minister driven out of his church and the US for statutory rape; he makes a living as a tour guide, but his tendency to fall off the wagon every 18 months – and the ensuing meltdown – doesn’t endear him to the busloads of middle-aged women he shows around the area. He’s just had his latest lapse as the play begins, and instead of taking his tour group to the city hotel on their itinerary has brought them here, in the hopes that spending time with his friend the owner will help him.

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: Dinner With Friends

Like many of the Pulitzer winners I've seen before, Dinner With Friends - Donald Margulies' play won the literary prize in 2000 - concerns itself with middle class American couples spending time in each others' homes. Unlike the others, it isn't actually about racism, or indeed any subject larger than the relationships we see on stage. Food writer Gabe (Shaun Dooley) and his wife Karen (Sara Stewart) are having a friend and her children round for dinner, giving her a blow-by-blow account of their recent holiday in Italy. It's not the relentlessness of their narrative that makes Beth (Finty Williams) suddenly burst into tears though: She said the reason her husband didn't join them at the dinner party was that he was away on business, but in fact he's left her for another woman, and they're now planning to get a divorce.

Stage-to-screen review: The Vote

The second James Graham political play to have been running in London concurrently with The Angry Brigade, tickets for The Vote at the Donmar Warehouse were allocated by ballot, so although I applied I wasn't able to see the show at the theatre. I guess that's democracy for you, Donmar members didn't get preferential treatment, and neither did critics - it's just a fortuitous coincidence that all the newspaper critics' applications successfully got them tickets for the same night. And just in time to give it a boost for its showing on More4 on election night! That was the alternative option for those of us who didn't get to see the starry cast in the flesh, a live broadcast at the exact time that the show is set: 8:30 to 10pm, the final 90 minutes of voting in a Lambeth polling station. It's a marginal seat and, with the election looking like a closer-run thing than it actually turned out to be, every vote could be crucial.

Theatre review: The Armour

Last year a trio of Tennessee Williams Hotel Plays was staged at the Langham, a luxury hotel just off Oxford Circus. 2015 is the hotel's 150-year anniversary, and after the success of last year's show, they commissioned the theatre company Defibrillator to return and commemorate it, but this time with a piece written specifically for this space. After running a competition to find a suitable play, the company settled on a pitch by Australian playwright Ben Ellis, which would look back at certain events that are unique to the Langham's history. The result is The Armour, a three-act-play which like the Williams shorts takes audiences around the building at half-hour intervals, moving upwards through the hotel's floors, while moving backwards through its history. So we begin in the present day, in one of the private basement bars where pop star Jade (Hannah Spearmint From Off Of S Club) has locked herself away when she's meant to be performing an arena gig.

Theatre review: The Lightning Child

Euripides' The Bacchae features an antagonist threatened by sexuality, particularly that of women, whose plan to defeat this perceived threat involves him dressing as a woman himself. Throw in that popular Greek tragedy mainstay, the hermaphrodite seer Teiresias (Bette Bourne,) and it's not hard to see why it might have something to say to transgender people to this day, and be ripe for adaptation. Hence The Lightning Child, the final new premiere of the season at Shakespeare's Globe, and the latest collaboration between Ché Walker (book and lyrics) and Arthur Darvill (music and lyrics.) A disco-infused musical adaptation of the gory classic, The Lightning Child opens with Neil Armstrong (Harry Hepple) being cautioned by his wife that his planned mission is hubristic. Armstrong, of course, goes anyway, and in a scene left out of the history books encounters the man in the Moon, aka the Ladyboy Herald (Jonathan Chambers.) An acolyte of Dionysus, the Herald tells the astronaut of another case of hubris that upset the god.