Stage-to-screen review: Good Grief

An intimate piece of theatre, created specially for streaming at home: Nearly a year into lockdown, can a one-act two-hander feel too different from a one-off TV drama? Natalie Abrahami has some ideas on how to make this feel, if not quite like theatre, like a hybrid of the two mediums as she directs Lorien Haynes' tragicomedy Good Grief for the screen. Adam (Nikesh Patel) has lost his partner Liv after eight years of cancer. Their friend Cat (Sian Clifford) is the last one left at his house after the wake, and one of the people who it seems best understands, if not entirely approves of, his eccentric ways of grieving. These include compartmentalising Liv's belongings around a house that's now far too big for just him in rooms like "the sad room" and "the boring room," and a lot of inappropriate humour, like opening the eulogy by mentioning Liv's extraordinary promiscuity before they got together.

Theatre review: Gloria

I try to write reviews without major spoilers in them but it can be a minefield: Gloria is a play that I could try to talk about without mentioning the twist halfway through, but it’s so crucial to what the play’s about there’d be little point writing about it at all if I didn’t at least allude to it. So I’ll start with the story’s setup in the first paragraph, and after that read at your own risk if you’re planning on seeing the show. We start with a bitter, and not all that funny, office sitcom: Kae Alexander, Colin Morgan and Ellie Kendrick play PAs to various editors in the New York headquarters of a national magazine, with Bayo Gbadamosi as an intern who’s been kept deliberately far from any useful work just in case he develops an interest in working there for real, and gets in the way of the others’ ambitions. But Michael Longhurst’s production sets their realistic cubicles in front of chipboard walls that overtly remind us this is a theatrical setting; and besides the writer is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and anyone who saw An Octoroon will know he likes to play around with form. SPOILER ALERT after the text cut.