Theatre review: Till The Stars Come Down

Beth Steel's Till The Stars Come Down has been compared to Chekhov, and though it owes as much to Coronation Street it does centre on three sisters: In a Northern former coalmining town Hazel (Lucy Black) and Maggie (Aisling Loftus) are helping youngest sister Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) get ready for her wedding. While Hazel lives down the road with her husband John (Adrian Bower) and teenage daughters Leanne (Ruby Thompson) and Sarah (Cadence Williams, alternating with Lillie Babb and Elodie Blomfield,) and Maggie rather abruptly moved away for work some months earlier, Sylvia has stayed at home ever since their mother's death, keeping their father Tony (Alan Williams) company. So her wedding represents both moving on from the past, and a day where she can be the focus of attention rather than the supportive one, but she's got a bad feeling something's going to go wrong.

Theatre review: The Cord

Writer-director Bijan Sheibani has worked with Irfan Shamji multiple times before, so you can see why he'd take advantage of that working relationship to cast the extraordinary actor in his latest play as well, putting him at the centre of an intense mental breakdown in The Cord. It's an evening that put me in mind of The Father, in the sense that it's a brilliant evening of theatre I'm glad I caught, but not necessarily one I'd want to put myself through again. Ash (Shamji) is a new father, whose wife Anya (Eileen O'Higgins) is still recovering from a birth with some complications, but apart from the inevitable lack of sleep is largely settling into her new life, and bonding with the baby. Ash seems to feel slightly excluded from their new group, but it's only after his mother Jane (Lucy Black) visits that this seems to tip over into a more serious mental condition.

Theatre review: Linck & Mülhahn

Not that there seem to be a lot of great times for the trans and non-binary community lately, but we're in the middle of some particularly bad days at the moment, so it's fitting timing for a historical drama about a pioneering gender-bending couple. Linck & Mülhahn may be a tragicomedy that delivers on the tragic side as much at the comic, but it's also undeniably triumphant, celebratory, and optimistic that, while not enough has changed between 1721 and 2023, the day is coming. It's inspired by real people and events, but Ruby Thomas' play does add its own caveats about what exactly constitutes a true story - is it the story as interpreted by the laws and mores of the time, or the truth as felt and experienced by the people at the heart of it? In 18th century Prussia, Anastasius Linck (Maggie Bain) is a well-liked soldier in his regiment and as much known for his debauchery and female conquests as any of them.

Theatre review: The Haystack

Roxana Silbert finally directs her first show since taking over Hampstead Theatre with the last production of her opening season, Al Blyth's debut full-length play The Haystack. The people searching for needles in it are GCHQ computer coders Neil (Big Favourite Round These Parts Oliver Johnstone) and Zef (Enyi Okoronkwo,) on secondment to the counter-terrorism division when they impress the Deputy Director, Hannah (Sarah Woodward) so much she keeps them in her team permanently. They do wonder exactly what their first assignment actually has to do with terrorism: Junior Guardian journalist Cora (Rona Morison) has discovered a possible connection between Saudi Arabian money and a number of British MPs, and the pair are set to task finding her source. After some time monitoring Cora they're suddenly taken off the case, only for her source, a Saudi princess (a pre-recorded Sirine Saba) to die in mysterious circumstances.

Theatre review: Top Girls

Which five people, living or dead, real or fictional, would you invite to your dream dinner party? To most people that’s a creaky old conversation-starter, but to Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) it’s the perfect way to celebrate a promotion, in the famous opening act of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. It’s 1981, Marlene’s become the first female Managing Director of Top Girls Employment Agency, and she’s gone to a trendy restaurant with five women from history and legend who embody a female ideal - or at least someone’s idea of it. Victorian adventurer Isabella Bird (Siobhan Redmond) and 13th century Japanese concubine, Buddhist nun and author Lady Nijō (Wendy Kweh) made their own way in a man’s world while others, like Pope Joan (Amanda Lawrence) and Brueghel’s soldier-woman Dull Gret (Ashley McGuire) took on masculine roles, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Theatre review: The York Realist

Josie Rourke kicks off her final full year in charge of the Donald and Margot Warehouse with a revival of Peter Gill’s The York Realist, a play I’ve seen before and which, especially in Robert Hastie’s quality-cast production, feels like watching a quietly revolutionary piece of gay theatre, largely because it isn’t, at heart, a “gay play.” It’s sometime in the 1960s and George (Ben Batt) is a farmer living a long bus ride away from York, where he’s been cast in a community production of the York Mystery Plays. He doesn’t have a phone so, when he misses a few rehearsals in a row, assistant director John (Jonathan Bailey) travels up to his house in person to find out why. He does manage to convince George to stay in the production, and his belief in his acting talent seems to be genuine, but he’s got another motive for coming all that way and soon the pair’s obvious attraction sees them disappear into George’s bedroom while his mother sleeps.

Theatre review: 3 Winters

As we reach Nicholas Hytner's final months running the National, a number of the most successful creatives from the last few years of his reign feature heavily. Howard Davies has been most closely associated with directing Russian classics on the Lyttelton stage, and though his latest production is a new Croatian play, it feels very much part of this ongoing series. In part it comes down to the set, this time provided by Tim Hatley: These shows have been noted for their audacious scene changes, and they're not only present and correct but a vital component of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters. This is because the winters in the story occur decades apart in the same house, and to the same family. In 1945, as the Communists take over, they evict the old royalist families. Rose (Jo Herbert,) her husband Alexander (Alex Price in 1945, James Laurenson in 1990) and their baby daughter Masha are allocated a large room in the mansion where Rose's mother Monika (Josie Walker) was once a servant.

Theatre review: Drawing the Line

Howard Brenton's on a bit of a roll at Hampstead Theatre, where he's debuting his third new play in just over a year. After the English Civil War and Chinese political prisoners he turns to the very last days of the Raj, with the 1947 partition of India, and the man charged with Drawing the Line. A respected judge but with no knowledge either of India or of maps, Cyril Radcliffe (Tom Beard) is called upon to redraw the map of the subcontinent. As the British Empire withdraws, India is filled with bloody religious conflict; although many different religions are represented in the country, Radcliffe's job is to divide along artificially simplistic lines: India for the Hindus, led by Nehru (Silas Carson,) and a new nation of Pakistan in the North for the Muslims, led by Jinnah (Paul Bazely.) With all the religious groups spread throughout the country, Radcliffe begins with a blank canvas, but his attempts at fairness will come across pressure not just from political interests, but personal ones as well.

Theatre review: Children of the Sun

Howard Davies directing a Russian play has become a bit of an annual National Theatre tradition, often in a translation by Andrew Upton. This year they tackle Maxim Gorky, and his 1905 look at young intellectuals in a safe bubble that won't last forever, Children of the Sun. Protasov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) is head of a family that's owned much of their small town for decades - although their finances aren't quite what they used to be, perhaps in part due to Protasov's occupation: A scientist, he spends his days in a home laboratory doing chemical experiments that seem to require constant supplies. His sister Liza (Emma Lowndes,) who suffers from an unspecified illness, is regularly rejecting the advances of family friend and local vet Boris (Paul Higgins.) His wife Yelena (Justine Mitchell) is spending all her time with artist Vageen (Gerald Kyd.) And Protasov himself is the unwilling target of romantic advances from Boris' sister Melaniya (Lucy Black.)