Theatre review: Present Laughter

While I appreciate a lot of the witty lines I've never been quite sure why Noël Coward's popularity has never majorly faltered - there's good stuff there but never enough to convince me he deserves quite the standing he continues to have. It's something that nags at the background of even the most successful revivals like this one - fortunately for Matthew Warchus, his production of Present Laughter has enough aces up its sleeve to keep those niggles very firmly in the background. The most obvious of these is Andrew Scott, who after years of being a firm favourite among regular theatregoers in the know got an overnight worldwide following after Sherlock, but who in recent months seems to have stepped up to another new level thanks to Fleabag. It's apt enough, then, that he's playing Garry Essendine - Coward's fairly transparent author-substitute may be famous predominantly for his stage work, but he also commands a kind of obsessive fandom.

Theatre review: Tartuffe, the Imposter

Molière’s religious con-man Tartuffe has been around a lot in the past year, but for various reasons (having bronchitis when I was meant to be seeing it in Stratford-upon-Avon; avoiding the Theatre Royal Haymarket like the plague) the National’s is the first of the current crop I’ve caught. And certainly as adapted by John Donnelly and directed by Blanche McIntyre the play shows why so many people have chosen it at this particular moment. Robert Jones’ set is a garishly opulent living room that nods to the play’s origins at Versailles, but the action’s been relocated to Highgate where Orgon (Kevin Doyle,) who made his fortune in unspecified dubious ways, lives with his mother Pernelle (Susan Engel,) daughter Mariane (Kitty Archer,) son Damis (Enyi Okoronkwo,) second wife Elmire (Future Dame Olivia Williams) and her brother Cleante (Hari Dhillon.) All except Pernelle are currently horrified at the puritanical turn the household has taken.

Theatre review: One For Sorrow

Some day I’ll see a play where well-meaning but essentially ineffectual liberals don’t turn into dribbling racists within minutes of being placed in an extreme situation; Cordelia Lynn’s One For Sorrow is not that play. A bomb has gone off in a West London nightclub, and terrorists are still in there with hundreds of hostages, threatening to detonate a second one. A middle-class family living in the area have effectively barricaded themselves into their home as the sound of sirens and helicopters comes in from outside, and while younger daughter Chloe (Kitty Archer) walks into the living room every few minutes with an updated death toll, her sister Imogen (Pearl Chanda) has attempted to be more proactive: In a plot inspired by a real event after a bombing in France when people opened their doors to strangers who’d been left stranded and scared, she’s posted #OpenDoor on Twitter, to indicate that anyone feeling unsafe nearby could go to her for help.