Theatre review: Coming Clean

Right now you can bookend Kevin Elyot’s playwriting career by travelling one stop on the Victoria Line: As the run ends on his final play, Twilight Song, in Finsbury Park, over in Islington the King’s Head revives his 1982 debut, Coming Clean; and taken together they do make it look like My Night With Reg was, if not a fluke, at least an outlier. American writer and lecturer Greg (Jason Nwoga) and lazy wannabe writer Tony (Lee Knight) have been together for five years and are happy together if a bit set in their ways. These ways do include a bit of extramarital action, though – we’re in the pre-AIDS era here and they’ve got an agreement that they can sleep with other people as long as it’s confined to one-night stands. This gets complicated when they hire an unemployed actor, Robert (Tom Lambert) as a house cleaner, and Greg’s apparent impatience with him conceals an attraction.

Theatre review: Savage

The title of Claudio Macor's Savage surely refers to whatever sadist decided a poky room over the Arts Theatre was fit for purpose as a performance space. In my one previous visit to Above The Arts, the venue's notorious overheating problem seemed to have been mostly resolved, but tonight it was clearly back with a vengeance. Between the buckets of sweat, the acoustics that favour every other room in the building apart from the one we're in, and sightlines that, I would estimate, leave about four or five seats with an unimpeded view of the action (mine wasn't one of them,) and the sooner that long-promised remodeling of the theatre comes along, the better - especially if this unloved second space ends up getting remodeled right out of existence. In circumstances like these, any positives the actual play itself might have, if any, are pretty hard to spot.

Theatre review: Archimedes' Principle

Theatre's rarely afraid to deal with touchy subjects and the Park Theatre's studio space gives us a continental take on the paranoia and witch-hunts around paedophilia. Josep Maria Miró i Coromina's Archimedes' Principle follows a single sequence of events in a swimming pool's staff changing room, but tells its story out of sequence, jumping back and forth with a few moments being repeated as we see where the pieces fit together. Brandon (Lee Knight) and Matt (Matt Bradley-Robinson) are young swimming instructors at the pool, working with children. After the morning's classes, Brandon is taken to one side by the pool's manager Anna (Kathryn Worth) and informed that a serious accusation has been made about how tactile he is with the children he teaches.