Stage-to-screen review: Lights Up - Harm

The next BBC Lights Up offering comes courtesy of the Bush Theatre, where Phoebe Eclair-Powell's Harm had been due to premiere during one of the various false starts of the last year. Instead Atri Banerjee's production of the monologue has been reimagined on location, with Leanne Best's nameless Woman wandering the empty rooms of a modern mansion. She's an estate agent who, after selling the place to Alice, a minor Instagram star, struck up an unlikely and very uneven friendship with her. To Alice, The Woman is an older acquaintance who can be an occasional drinking buddy and a sounding board for her frustrations about trying to get pregnant, but to The Woman Alice very quickly becomes an obsession: Soon she has a secret online alter-ego, sadbitch11, dedicated to taking down her new friend.

Theatre review: Sweat

On past experience, a play having won the Pulitzer isn’t much of a guarantee that I’m going to like it, if anything the opposite; identifying a hot-button topic to write about often seems to be enough to win regardless of execution. Lynn Nottage is the first woman to have won the theatre prize twice, and the Donald and Margot Warehouse gets the UK premiere of the latest, Sweat. Nottage certainly identified her hot-button topic early: She started research in 2011, for a play which in part feels like an explanation for why parts of America were so vulnerable to the rise of Trump. The good news is that, in Lynette Linton’s production, the execution lives up to the idea. Nottage was inspired by the statistic that Reading, Pennsylvania, a relatively comfortable industrial city in the 20th century, was now the poorest place in America. The shift came when the textile mill that was the area’s primary employer significantly downsized and outsourced its work, leaving people who’d always felt comfortable in their job security suddenly unemployed.

Theatre review: The Match Box

Actors making a first foray into writing or directing for the stage is going to be a bit of a meme this summer. First up is Lia Williams who turns director for Frank McGuinness' new play, a monologue first seen in Liverpool last year. The Match Box takes place in a battered holiday home on a remote Irish island where Sal, a Liverpudlian of Irish descent (Leanne Best) now lives alone. A single mother, her 12-year-old daughter was caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting and killed. Sal's story is of course a heartbreaking one of loss, and her inability to process her grief is powerfully conveyed. But when the dust settles and it becomes clear the killers will never be brought to justice, the play starts to enter even darker territory: Sal and her parents start to mutter things about revenge, but did they really have anything to do with the violent fate of the prime suspects?