Theatre review: Love, Love, Love

I imagine there's a hiatus coming up in my theatregoing and reviewing, thanks to a certain global situation targeting the Baby Boomers, but in the meantime here's Mike Bartlett's own dig at that generation. After the Brexit result came in I predicted Love, Love, Love would be a play that kept coming back over the years, and here it is as Rachel O'Riordan's second directing gig in her inaugural Lyric Hammersmith season. It follows Sandra (Rachael Stirling) and Kenneth (Nicholas Burns) from first meeting to happy ending - but every chapter in their story has collateral damage they've become uncannily adept at ignoring. The first of these is Kenneth's brother Henry (Patrick Knowles,) whom Sandra has just started dating at the beginning of the play; older by only four years he appears to be from an entirely different generation.

Theatre review: Cougar

Rose Lewenstein's strange and sexy Cougar puts a luxury hotel room on the Orange Tree's in-the-round stage, a single set that stands in for dozens of identical rooms around the world. The first one is in London where Leila (Charlotte Randle) has been speaking at a conference. One of her colleagues made an aggressive pass at her in the hotel bar afterwards, and barman John (Mike Noble) came to her defence, hitting him with an ice bucket and losing his job in the process. Leila's taken a room in the hotel and brings John back to it for the night - nothing happens between them but they both want it to, so she proposes a deal: She'll pay for him to come with her on her many international business trips, have sex with her at night and see the world during the day while she's at work. But as soon as they get through customs they're strangers again, and John has to promise not to fall in love.

Theatre review: Road

In a rare instance of the Royal Court revisiting a past work, John Tiffany directs a 30th anniversary production of Road, Jim Cartwright’s slice of life in an unnamed Lancashire town. It seems a rather pointed revival of a play which comes down hard on Thatcher’s Britain, as despite the – nostalgic and funny by turns – period trappings it still feels relevant, its characters going out to get drunk and try to pull, covering up their desperation at the dead end their lives are in. Some have been led to unusual extremes, like Mike Noble’s Skin-Lad, a Buddhist skinhead, or Joey (Shane Zaza) and Clare (Faye Marsay,) dying in bed on hunger strike over something they can’t quite articulate. Most have more familiar stories of trying to cope though, and unemployed ex-sailor Scullery (Lemn Sissay) offers to be the audience’s tour guide over one typical Saturday night from dusk to dawn.

Theatre review: Game

Ever since Cock, Mike Bartlett has been writing plays based around a very specific set design, often putting his central characters under vicious attack. After that first cockfight, and the recent bullfight, he now puts a young couple in the middle of a real-life shoot-'em-up video game. The first of a number of plays coming up that look at the spiralling cost of housing, Game sees Ashley (Mike Noble) and Carly (Jodie McNee) move into a luxury two-storey apartment for free. Of course, there's a catch: Like the Big Brother house, Ashley and Carly's new home is under 24-hour camera surveillance, and every wall is a two-way mirror behind which visitors can watch them. But simply watching isn't the main attraction - paying customers are there to play a kind of human safari. At any time of day, an unseen stranger might shoot one of them with a tranquilliser dart. And this isn't a TV set but the home where the couple plan to live and raise a family for several years.

Theatre review: Port

It's been almost half an hour since Simon Stephens wrote a new play and the National Theatre are clearly worried audiences might be suffering withdrawal symptoms. So they've dug into his archives and Marianne Elliott (who directed this play's premiere in 2002 and most recently collaborated with Stephens on The Curious Incident) directs Port in the Lyttelton. Over two-and-a-half hours Stephens makes the case for his home town of Stockport as the most depressing place on earth, a concrete tomb in Lizzie Clachan's design, where we first meet Racheal (Kate O'Flynn) in 1988, aged 11. In a drunken fit of violence her father Jonathan (Jack Deam) has locked himself into the flat so Racheal's mother Christine (Liz White) has taken her children to the car, where they sit all night waiting for a sign that Jonathan might let them back into their home.