Theatre review: The Here and This and Now

Paired up with The War Has Not Yet Started in Theatre Royal Plymouth's rep season at Southwark Playhouse, Glenn Waldron's The Here and This and Now takes a look at pharmaceutical companies on an intimate scale and, eventually, a global one. Niall (Simon Darwen) leads a team of pharmaceutical reps on a team-building away-day. Alongside games where they recite their sales mantra of "Captivate! Associate! Detonate! Kill!" the central point is for them all to rehearse Niall's trademark pitch to receptionists, a cheesy story about his sick son designed to create empathy and get them five minutes with a senior consultant to sell discount liver-spot cream. Gemma (Tala Gouveia) is new to the team and enthusiastically delivers her own version of the pitch, but the other two members have been working for the company much longer and have a much more cynical outlook on what they're doing.

Theatre review: Monster Raving Loony

You do tend to get a little something extra when you're in the audience for a James Graham play; The Man had its receipts, Privacy came with airline safety-style instruction cards, while his latest, Monster Raving Loony, comes with a whole goody bag on every seat, containing party hat, bingo card, raffle ticket and a gift - mine had a party blower but I spotted comedy mustaches and plastic Groucho Marx glasses elsewhere*. This being Graham, the sort of party this is is a political party, but not the kind with actual hopes of winning an election - in fact one rule of the Monster Raving Loony Party was that anyone who actually won their seat would be expelled from the party. This is the story of Screaming Lord Sutch, born in 1940 as David Sutch (Samuel James) in Harrow, North London, growing up in a cluttered house with his widowed mother while the nearby public school churned out future ministers.

Theatre review: Grand Guignol

I described 'Tis Pity She's a Whore last night as grand guignol, but here's a play that looks back at the theatre that put that phrase into the vocabulary. Carl Grose's comedy Grand Guignol arrives at Southwark Playhouse from Plymouth in time for Hallowe'en, and despite being played for laughs rather than scares, comes with enough gore and splatter to live up to the name. It's the early days of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris, and impresario Max Maurey (Andy Williams) has scored a hit with his formula: An evening of short horror plays, each crammed with madness and violence, and invariably culminating in gory murder and dismemberment. Lead actors Mlle Maxa (Emily Raymond) and Paulais (Robert Portal) have become stars, and the pressure is on writer Andre De Lorde (Jonathan Broadbent) to come up with even bigger extremes for the next season.