Theatre review: Backstroke

Future Dames Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig play mother and daughter in Anna Mackmin's Backstroke at the Donald and Margot Warehouse. Beth (Imrie) has had a stroke, and is in hospital unable to move or communicate. When her daughter Bo (Greig) arrives, she bombards the medical staff with demands to know how long her mother has left to live, and for them to take out her drip and stop feeding her. What initially seems like a callous hope that she can get rid of her mother as soon as possible turns out to be genuinely heartfelt concern: Beth spent her entire life insisting that if she ended up in this situation she should be nil by mouth, and there should be no attempts to prolong her life; if anything she asks to be put out of her misery. But as with so much in her life she never actually put her wishes down on paper, and now Bo fears she'll get the prolonged death she always dreaded.

Theatre review: Barcelona

Taking two Netflix stars closely associated with Madrid and Paris and throwing them together in a third European city, Bess Wohl's Barcelona is an entertaining story so full of red herrings that even trying to describe a genre for it feels like a spoiler. Its plot does hinge on quite a lot of elements that probably don't bear too much close inspection - I hear that hen dos have got a lot more expensive and elaborate since we took Alex to an Eighties disco night, but was a 12 hour+ flight each way for a hen weekend considered normal a decade later in 2009, when the play is set? Well that's what's brought Irene (Lily Collins) to Barcelona, where she's slipped away from her group to hook up with the man she'd been flirting with in a bar, Manuel (Álvaro Morte.) He's brought her back to a small apartment with a great view of Sagrada Família, a beautiful horizon like a jewel in the sun.

Theatre review: Wolves on Road

Following Beru Tessema's well-received House of Ife, the playwright returns to the Bush for another story with family at its heart, but this time also taking in much wider social and financial themes, as Wolves on Road dips its toe into cryptocurrency - and suggests that's probably as deep into that particular world it's safe to get into. Manny (Kieran Taylor-Ford) is looking to get rich quick, but so far his instincts to resell designer goods online have just resulted in him being saddled with a pile of fakes even the local market stalls won't take off him. His best friend Abs (Hassan Najib) gets him into a crypto app, and after his initial reservations Manny gets sucked into the seemingly limitless possibilities for growth. But the big money will come if they can get in on a new currency at the start, and a local boy done good has come up with a new app that combines crypto with a money transfer service.