Theatre review: White Pearl

I was getting occasional flashbacks to Clybourne Park in the Royal Court Downstairs as a black comedy about race goads its characters into voicing their most extreme thoughts to a mix of laughter and shocked gasps from the audience. But instead of America’s relationship with blackness it’s Asia’s relationship with whiteness that Anchuli Felicia King explores in White Pearl. Inspired by real-life advertising campaigns that went viral for the wrong reasons, Moi Tran’s set is the flashy Singapore headquarters of a comparatively new cosmetics company that’s been fast becoming a market leader in a number of countries; to reflect this, Indian founder Priya (Farzana Dua Elahe) and her Singaporean right-hand woman Sunny (Katie Leung) have made sure all the executives are women representing the different countries where their products are sold.

Theatre review: The Great Wave

A commonplace scene of teenage sisters squabbling quickly turns into a thriller when Hanako (Kirsty Rider) is dared to go for a late-night walk on the beach in the middle of a storm and disappears. She's assumed to have been washed away by a wave but her sister Reiko (Kae Alexander) insists she saw three men take her away. The investigation is fruitless and eventually abandoned, but a few years later the girls' friend Tetsuo (Leo Wan,) trying to clear his own name of suspicion in her disappearance, uncovers a wild conspiracy theory that might just hold the answer: Hanako's disappearance in 1979 might have been the first in a series of abductions of young Japanese men and women by North Korean forces. Francis Turnly's The Great Wave takes us from 1979 to 2003 in Japan and North Korea, which is indeed where Hanako is.

Theatre review: Gloria

I try to write reviews without major spoilers in them but it can be a minefield: Gloria is a play that I could try to talk about without mentioning the twist halfway through, but it’s so crucial to what the play’s about there’d be little point writing about it at all if I didn’t at least allude to it. So I’ll start with the story’s setup in the first paragraph, and after that read at your own risk if you’re planning on seeing the show. We start with a bitter, and not all that funny, office sitcom: Kae Alexander, Colin Morgan and Ellie Kendrick play PAs to various editors in the New York headquarters of a national magazine, with Bayo Gbadamosi as an intern who’s been kept deliberately far from any useful work just in case he develops an interest in working there for real, and gets in the way of the others’ ambitions. But Michael Longhurst’s production sets their realistic cubicles in front of chipboard walls that overtly remind us this is a theatrical setting; and besides the writer is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and anyone who saw An Octoroon will know he likes to play around with form. SPOILER ALERT after the text cut.

Theatre review: Teh Internet is Serious Business

I can't believe they missed the obvious typo in the title of Tim Price's Teh Internet is Serious Business - surely that should be "SRS BZNS?" It's the story of the "hacktivists" of Anonymous and LulzSec, and the second show in a row at the Royal Court Downstairs most of whose action takes place online. But both in tone and style it differs a lot from The Nether, as one major stipulation Price gave director Hamish Pirie was that he couldn't use video screens or projection to represent the internet. So, in Chloe Lamford's design, data is represented by a huge ball pit downstage, setting the scene for a - sometimes dangerously - playful world. Following the death of his stepfather, Jake Davis (Sexy Scottish Peter Pan Kevin Guthrie) is crippled by agoraphobia. Barely leaving his bedroom in the Shetlands, his only social outlet is the messageboard 4chan.