Theatre review: Pinter Four - Moonlight / Night School

For only the second time so far in his Pinter at the Pinter season, Jamie Lloyds hands the directing reigns to someone else for Pinter Four, with one big established name and one up-and-comer each taking one of the plays in this double bill. Just how generous a move this actually was is a bit of a different story, as apart from having one of the least ostentatiously famous casts in the whole season Pinter Four is made up of a couple of the more dubious entries in the writer's canon. This has been the installment I've least looked forward to in the whole season, because it opens with Moonlight which, when I saw it seven years ago at the Donmar Warehouse, was the single worst Pinter experience I've had, a 75-minute performance I remember as having lasted hours. Lyndsey Turner is the director who's been put in charge of this one, and on the plus side not only does she shave a few minutes off that running time but it actually feels just over an hour long this time as well.

Theatre review: Armstrong's War

There's not much need to adapt the hospital set from As Is for the Finborough's alternate show this month, as Colleen Murphy's Armstrong's War also features someone ill - although this time there's more chance of recovery, physically at least. Michael (Mark Quartley) is a Canadian soldier recovering from a bomb injury. Between physiotherapy sessions he's pretty much left forgotten in his room, so he's agreed to let a girl guide read to him once a week so she can earn a merit badge. It's a decision he quickly regrets when wheelchair-bound 12-year-old Halley (Jessica Barden) wheels into his room, an onslaught of perkiness reading from her favourite "girl detective" novel to a man who's happiest hiding under the bed, and who occasionally stops to have a chat into thin air with an old army buddy he lost in Afghanistan.