Theatre review: End

In the spirit of The Cornetto Trilogy being so named because of a non plot-significant ice cream being consumed in each film, I'm going to have to refer to David Eldridge's sequence of relationship plays as The Bros Trilogy from now on, given the briefly all-conquering pop trio get a completely random little dig from each of the three couples in the stories. After Beginning and Middle it's not particularly surprising if the end is called, well, End, but the title does also serve as an apt one for the last show to be programmed at the National by RuNo (the Dorfman having ended up lagging behind the other two theatres because of emergency repair work.) Having had wildly different reactions to the first two instalments I was strangely cheered up by the blurb suggesting the end in question was death not divorce, and after the sourness of the last chapter I was glad to find something more bittersweet.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

After a few years away from its ubiquity about a decade ago, I'm going to guess Our Country's Good is back on the A'Level syllabus as it makes a return to the stage (and the school groups in the audience seemed very familiar with the play as well.) For Rachel O'Riordan's production at the Lyric Hammersmith Timberlake Wertenbaker has made some revisions to her most famous play, apparently to provide a more authentic voice to the speeches by the play's sole Australian First Nations character, who casts a detached, quizzical eye over the hordes of British men and women who've come off a fleet of ships. In addition to these text revisions, which I guess are the translations into Aboriginal dialect that pepper the speeches, instead of a man in traditional dress Killara (Naarah) is now a woman in modern clothes, witnessing the soldiers and convicts arriving in what will eventually become Sydney in the late 18th century.

Theatre review: Foxfinder

Last seen in London in 2011 when it was the Papatango award winner, Dawn King's Foxfinder is, on the face of it, a canny revival for 2018 when its paranoia and scapegoating can be repackaged as a Brexit play. But something's gone wrong in the execution of Rachel O'Riordan's production, and it’s left a play that can be genuinely creepy and atmospheric floundering. Samuel (Paul Nicholls) and Judith Covey (Heida Reed) own a farm somewhere in a dystopian England where food is scarce, so farmers like them are under immense pressure to live up to – seemingly quite unrealistic – crop quotas. Some months earlier, the couple’s four-year-old son drowned, and Samuel retreated into a long depression. Between this and bad weather they’re struggling to live up to their targets so the government has sent an investigator to determine if they’ve mismanaged the farm, or worse: If there’s a fox on their land.

Theatre review: Killology

Playwright Gary Owen is making a niche for himself as the very disturbing voice of a dispossessed underclass, as well as being, presumably, the Welsh tourist board's worst nightmare, giving us as he does a Wales that's an almost apocalyptic wasteland stalked by feral gangs. These gangs are the bane of Davey's (Sion Daniel Young) life growing up, and occasional incidents of horrific violence shape who he becomes as a teenager - fighting back against the bullies doesn't work so he learns to pick on those weaker than him himself. But there's even worse violence waiting for him, and this time he's unlikely to survive to continue the cycle. On the opposite end of the social scale, entirely fictional violence has shaped the life of Paul (Richard Mylan,) the designer behind a hugely successful computer game, Killology, which skips the fights of traditional beat-em-ups and goes straight for the kill, with the most creative and sadistic ways of killing opponents gaining the most points.