Theatre review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Rebecca Frecknall returns to the major Tennessee Williams plays at the Almeida and, with The Glass Menagerie having been done to death in recent years, the next obvious candidate would be Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which hasn't had a major London production since the genitals-forward one of 2017. Still, that one having such a distinctive, er, visual identity means Frecknall still has to put a strong stamp on her version to make it stand out, and unsurprisingly she does. A wealthy, plantation-owning Southern family get together to celebrate the 65th birthday of Big Daddy (Lennie James,) who's recently got the all-clear from cancer. Except he hasn't: In a play about secrets, the one most of the family share is that the doctor's letter actually revealed his condition was inoperable, terminal, and about to enter its final stages. But in what is being considered a kindness, he and Big Mama (Clare Burt) are being kept in the dark.

Stage-to-screen review: One Night In Miami...

In recent months both of the original big streaming services have offered, on the more "prestige" end of their output (coincidentally today it was announced both films had received multiple Oscar nominations,) film adaptations of stage plays that imagine the behind-closed-doors life of iconic 20th century black figures. A few weeks ago I watched Netflix's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which I found good but lacking some of the dimensions of the original; today I tackled Amazon Prime's offering, One Night In Miami... which if anything has the opposite effect of building up the play's world. Part of that is simply down to time: Ma Rainey cut at least an hour off the original play's running time, but when I saw Kemp Powers' play at the Donmar Warehouse in 2016 it ran at a tight 90 minutes, meaning this nearly two-hour film is actually longer than the original. Powers himself adapts the screenplay for Regina King's film, which takes place in 1964, hours after a boxer still known as Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) first becomes heavyweight champion of the world.

Theatre review: We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 - 1915

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The Bush invites professional critics in tomorrow. Photos below are from the show's rehearsals.

I usually make it a rule not to read any other reviews before writing my own, but every rule has exceptions and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 - 1915 is one; I felt the play's reception when it premiered in America would provide some context I needed to interpret certain things about it. As the unwieldy title suggests, Sibblies Drury's play presents something that deliberately looks incredibly rough-and-ready, a showcase by six actors based on a genocide in Africa just before the First World War. The years 1884 - 1915 are the ones when Namibia was a German colony, and over time the Germans favoured various local tribes to do their dirty work for them. One such tribe were the Herero, whose resistance resulted in the order to wipe them out.

Theatre review: God's Property

Arinze Kene's God's Property looks at what it is to be mixed-race in Britain, particularly at a time when people were still discovering what kind of racial identity that might be. It's 1982, with the Brixton riots a fairly recent memory, and Onochie (Ash Hunter,) the teenage son of a Nigerian father (now deceased) and white Irish mother, returns to his home in Deptford to find an unexpected visitor. His mother has disappeared, and in her place is his older brother Chima (Kingsley Ben-Adir,) just released from prison after 10 years, during which the rest of his family made no contact with him. Partly as a result of his brother's crime and the cloud it's left over his family in the neighbourhood, Onochie has in the intervening years stopped thinking of himelf as black, and even joined a local group of skinheads.

Theatre Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Open Air Theatre)

Alternating with Ragtime at Regent's Park is a play that's almost synonymous with the open air venue, although this take on A Midsummer Night's Dream is far from a frothy, family picnic affair. Taking his cue from the memoirs of Mikey Walsh, who provides the programme notes, Matthew Dunster's production is a Big Fat Gypsy Dream, relocating the action to a caravan site that looks set to be flattened to make way for a Westfield-style shopping centre. In a subculture where arranged marriages still exist, Hermia (Hayley Gallivan) loves Lysander (Tom Padley) but her father wants her to marry Demetrius (Kingsley Ben Adir.) If she doesn't comply, her father has asked the gypsy king Theseus, himself about to get married, to exact a harsh punishment. Hermia flees with Lysander, but her friend Helena (Rebecca Oldfield) is in unrequited love with Demetrius, and they follow the pair into the woods - where they get caught up in the magical games of the fairies who live there.