Theatre review: Pinter Three - Landscape / Apart From That / Girls / That’s All / God’s District / Monologue / That’s Your Trouble / Special Offer / Trouble in the Works / Night / A Kind of Alaska

If there’s a running theme to Pinter Three, the hendecuple* bill that continues Jamie Lloyd’s collection of the playwright’s short writings to mark ten years since his death, it’s a kind of bittersweet romance. It’s something that becomes most apparent in Night, the penultimate piece in which Meera Syal and Tom Edden play a long-married couple whose love seems to remain genuine and strong, but whose memories of their relationship differ entirely: They each remember their first date completely differently, and may in fact be recalling encounters with different people - but does it even matter? The evening is bookended by the longest plays, and Night’s miscommunication somewhat mirrors the opener, Landscape, in which Beth (Tamsin Greig) and Duff (Keith Allen) have a conversation consisting of two entirely different threads – he recounting his day, she remembering stories from the early days of their relationship.

Theatre review: Barking in Essex

How funny is the idea of Sheila Hancock saying "cunt?" Barking in Essex is confident that it will stay funny for a little over two hours. Spoiler alert: It doesn't. It's not often a new play opens directly in the West End, and this one is new in the sense of "new to the stage" as opposed to "newly written" - unless Clive Exton was such a workaholic that his death six years ago didn't slow him down. An opening scene that revolves around jokes about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and the long-since cancelled Weakest Link is a reminder that there wasn't a huge rush to bring this one to the stage. Was it a lost gem just waiting for the right cast to become available? Or was it gathering dust until the popularity of The Only Way Is Essex made producers sniff cash in anything with the county's name in the title? Well, I haven't exactly been subtle in my introduction, clearly it's going to be the latter.