Theatre review: Guess How Much I Love You?

The Royal Court opens its seventieth anniversary year with one of its most notorious memes, although I'm not sure I would even count Luke Norris' Guess How Much I Love You Question Mark as part of that tradition, and not just because it doesn't take place in the Upstairs Theatre: The venue has traditionally used dead babies for shock value, but Norris' story takes the possibility of a baby dying and goes somewhere a lot more human and moving. It opens with an unnamed couple halfway through a pregnancy scan, playing Twenty Questions and discussing baby names, partly to distract them from the fact that the sonographer left them abruptly to get a second opinion, and has been gone for an unusually long time. We next meet Her (Rosie Sheehy) and Him (Robert Aramayo) during a sleepless night, after they've received a devastating diagnosis.

Theatre review: Speed

I wouldn't entirely put it past producers to try and put a bus that will blow up if it slows below 50 mph on stage, but until someone with more money than sense has that particular fever dream this Speed is something a bit different: Mohamed-Zain Dada's play is set in the basement of a Holiday Inn outside Birmingham, where three dangerous drivers who can't afford any more points on their licences have come for a speed awareness course. But if there's something odd about course leader Abz (Nikesh Patel) it goes a bit beyond his jittery enthusiasm. And if the participants feel like they've been racially profiled when they look around, they wouldn't be entirely wrong either: In a session the DVLA would probably have some notes about, Abz is actually piloting his own scheme aimed at dealing with anger issues among South Asian drivers.

Theatre review: Minority Report

I still have strong memories of the Lyric Hammersmith successfully translating science fiction to the stage with the striking Solaris a few years ago, so while it's a different creative team tackling Philip K. Dick, who inspired a number of the most successful sci-fi movies of all time, I was still optimistic that a venue willing to give the genre a chance would be a good choice to continue the experiment. Minority Report is quite a different proposition from the moody spookiness of Solaris, with the added challenges of a lot of action scenes, and Max Webster's production deals with them with varied - though mostly positive - results. But first, how to ensure future dystopia has the requisite dark cityscape of permanent rain? Adaptor David Haig has solved it by setting the story in London, so the view on stage isn't too different from the one out of the windows.

Theatre review: The Glow

When Alistair McDowall says he prefers his plays to offer more questions than answers you should believe him: The playwright who's previously taken us into the Cthulhu mythos and to Pluto now appears to take us into a Victorian ghost story, before veering off into a whole new English* mythology. In 1863, self-styled spiritualist medium Evelyn (Rakie Ayola) is roaming the cells of an asylum in search of someone to use as a conduit in her séances. She finds a woman she names Sadie (Ria Zmitrowicz,) who's forgotten her own name and everything else about herself, and essentially kidnaps her, bringing her back to stay with her. The horror-movie feel is tempered with humour as Evelyn's brattish son Mason (Fisayo Akinade) throws tantrums at having to share the house with the new arrival, but he may have a point about the woman they really know nothing about.

Theatre review: Anna X

"What if Sergey Lazarev's performance of 'You Are The Only One' at the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest, but roughly 30 times longer?"

Concluding Sonia Friedman's Re:Emerge season at the Pinter is the superficially frantic but essentially quite ponderous Anna X, Joseph Charlton's play about apps, influencers and the business of turning the appearance of success into a genuine commodity. Both characters in the two-hander trade on appearances, Ariel (Nabhaan Rizwan) by developing a dating app whose USP isn't so much the people on it as those off it: There's a waiting list to have your profile approved, and it's a lot longer than the actual list of users because you can't get on until you're vetted for looks and influence. Exclusivity is what'll make Ariel's fortune, and while the value of his company is still speculative he spends money like it's already in the bank. It's no surprise if he soon attracts Anna (Emma Corrin) who, and I don't think it's a spoiler as it's heavily hinted from the opening lines and confirmed soon after, is much more of a traditional con artist.