Theatre review: Romans, a Novel

I have to say that after some of Alice Birch's previous work, Romans, a Novel was a show I considered skipping; Kyle Soller's return to the stage was the reason I gave it a go, and the weird but thought-provoking epic proves to be worth the gamble. Soller plays Jack Roman, eldest of the three titular brothers, who we first meet as a ten-year-old on what turns out to be the night his mother will die, giving birth to his youngest brother. But first he will meet a blood-soaked soldier, apparently an uncle long since thought lost, who will instil in him a desire to live a certain kind of man's life, full of adventure and exploration. The subtitle "a Novel" is an unusual one to see attached to an original play but Birch's story and Sam Pritchard's production justify it in a sweeping family saga that feels very much like it's immersing the audience into a detailed, intricate story.

Theatre review: The Other Place

The National's currently got a full programme of shows that are as critically acclaimed as they are, frankly, bleak, and after the Dorfman's A Tupperware of Ashes and the Olivier's Coriolanus I'm completing the hat trick at the Lyttelton with Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place. Loosely (very loosely, which is why it's got a different title, Simon,) inspired by Antigone, the story's look at burial rites as a way of showing respect or contempt becomes one of how they're about saying goodbye, and how grief can turn into something toxic and twisted. Adam killed himself at his rural family home a few years ago; his brother Chris (Tobias Menzies) now owns it, and has kept the ashes there where he now lives with his new wife Erica (Nina Sosanya) and her teenager Leni (Lee Braithwaite,) as well as Adam's youngest daughter Issy (Alison Oliver) who moved back in when she couldn't pay her rent.

Theatre review: The Confessions

A British / Australian / Luxembourgish co-production, Alexander Zeldin's The Confessions, which he also directs at the Lyttelton, is based on conversations with his mother and her peers, and follows one woman's life from Australia in 1943 - when, as a child, she meets her father for the first time returning from the war and is confused because she thought the portrait of him on the wall was her father - to London in 2021, when she finally tells her son, who's been quizzing her just like the real author, to stop poking around for more details of her life. For the most part Amelda Brown narrates the story as the older Alice, while Eryn Jean Norvill plays her younger self in the scenes, but they occasionally trade places at particularly critical moments; perhaps Alice is so shaken by these events she steps out of her body, and can only confront them with the benefit of time.