Theatre review: Vincent in Brixton

Nicholas Wright's 2002 play Vincent in Brixton is a work of fiction, but it does have its basis in a few interesting facts, for example that before becoming an artist himself, Vincent van Gogh worked as an art dealer - an ironic job for someone whose own paintings would fail to sell during his lifetime, before becoming among the most valuable in the world after his death. In 1873 he was briefly transfered to the London office, and the play begins with him walking all the way from Greenwich, where he was staying, to Brixton, where he'd found a church close enough to the strict and stark Dutch Reform tradition he'd been raised in. Vincent (Jeroen Frank Kales) then takes a room at a local house, officially to live closer to his church of choice - but he's really picked it because he's spotted the landlady's daughter Eugenie (Ayesha Ostler) and decided he's fallen in love at first sight.

Theatre review: Invisible

They say write what you know, so actor/writers performing their own work tend to deal with their own experiences in the job - or, as often as not, their difficulty in finding one, especially if they belong to a minority that tends to get typecast. In Nikhil Parmar's Invisible, we're in an alternate present where peace has unilaterally broken out in the Middle East, so South Asian actors don't even have the option of bad guy terrorist roles any more, and are stuck fighting it out for the doctors and shopkeepers. Parmar plays Zayan, a classically trained actor who's not had a role for a while, and has largely given up even auditioning because of his fear of rejection. He scrapes a living with catering jobs and occasionally weed-dealing for his cousins (when he doesn't get mugged for the drugs by children,) and the effect it's had on his state of mind is threatening his personal life: His ex-girlfriend is dating a more successful actor, and is wondering whether Zayan is stable enough to look after their young daughter, even for the odd weekend.

Stage-to-screen review: OUTSIDE

Well, we can add another authentic theatre experience to the streaming equivalent: Those times a show has to be interrupted due to a technical hitch (and you're not sure how long it'll take to fix, should you go to the loo in case the show overruns a lot, or will you be out of your seat when it starts again?) Following last month's INSIDE, the Orange Tree live stream returns with a second trio of new short plays - this time all written by people who've worked at the venue before, if not necessarily as a writer. Unsurprisingly the theme this time is OUTSIDE, and Sonali Bhattacharyya's Two Billion Beats interprets this as a school playground, where star pupil Asha (Zainab Hasan) is uncharacteristically having to clean up graffiti as detention, while her little sister Bettina (Ashna Rabheru) loiters, not wanting to get on the bus alone and get bullied. Unfortunately I can't critique Two Billion Beats as Hasan's microphone failed just as we were getting to the crux of the play, so I didn't hear most of her dialogue from that point on; but the start did seem promising, with Asha comparing her school essay-writing technique to clickbait that gets her teacher hooked.

Theatre review: The Mikvah Project

The Mikvah Project feels a bit of an unlikely play to get a major revival within a few years of its premiere, when I was interested but not entirely convinced by it. But I've got a certain reputation to live down to as far as plays with extensive male nudity go and besides, I wanted to know if a different perspective would make it feel a bit more focused than it seemed last time. And Georgia Green's production - her professional debut, following its appearance last year as part of an Orange Tree new directors' showcase - does go some way towards filling in some gaps. The Mikvah is a Jewish ritual bath, more commonly used by women, but there are ones available for men as well, like the pair in Josh Azouz' play who meet there every Friday for particular reasons of their own. 35-year-old Avi (Alex Waldmann) goes to pray for the child he and his wife are trying to conceive (or as he puts it, he's praying to his balls.)