Theatre review: The One

Ian had just turned the conversation - I'll leave you to guess if there was a gleeful tone to his voice - to the early closure of Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest musical, when the house lights went down and "Music of the Night" started to play. The love song from Phantom recurs over the next 75 minutes as the backdrop to another unhealthy relationship in Vicky Jones' The One. University lecturer Harry (Rufus Wright) and his long-term girlfriend - originally his student - Jo (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) are staying up throughout the night, waiting for news of Jo's sister, who's gone into labour. Prompted by a late-night visitor, the couple confront each other and their relationship, revealing it to be a viciously antagonistic one that seems to thrive on them permanently goading each other into obnoxious behaviour, and with a sexual power play that's uncomfortable to watch.

Theatre review: The Night Before Christmas

Not too surprisingly for the second week of December, I'm in the middle of six solid days of seasonal¹ offerings, all of them with a slightly different flavour to the traditional Christmas fare. Soho's take is a revisiting of Anthony Neilson's play The Night Before Christmas, which he's rewritten as a musical with lyrics by himself and director Steve Marmion, and music by Tom Mills. There's certainly a creature or two stirring in Neilson's very adult version of the story, set in a warehouse owned by Gary (Navin Chowdhry,) a former city trader and now dealer in counterfeit goods. The toys and gadgets may be fake but he doesn't fancy having them stolen regardless, so when he catches an intruder in an elf costume he ties him up and calls his friend Simon (Craig Kelly.) By the time Simon's arrived though, Gary is convinced the man isn't a burglar at all, but an actual Elf (Craig Gazey,) who claims to have fallen off the sleigh, and needs to be returned before midnight or he'll die.

Theatre review: Pastoral

Actor Thomas Eccleshare turns playwright with the black comedy Pastoral¹, which Steve Marmion directs at Soho Theatre, where centuries of urbanisation can't stem the tide when nature decides to take back the land. Moll (Anna Calder-Marshall) is a pensioner who lives in a tower block in an unnamed English city where, out of a sense of duty for reasons that remain vague, two young men look after her. But today Manz (Hugh Skinner) and Hardy (Richard Riddell) aren't just there to check up on Moll; they want to pack all her things and evacuate her because the city's being invaded. The weeds that have broken through her floor are a clue, as flora and fauna have turned aggressive and overpowered the humans. But plans for escape are put on hold when a family of three arrives at the door looking for a safe place to stay, and the six band together against nature. In any case, Moll's certain the Ocado man will be there with the groceries any time now.

Non-review: Utopia

I can't call this a review as, for the first time this year, I couldn't handle the prospect of sitting through the whole of Utopia at Soho Theatre, so Andy and I left at the interval. Directors Steve Marmion and Max Roberts promised an ambitious project that invited a variety of writers, comedians, musicians and politicians to eschew art's tendency to look on the dark side. Instead they were to think positive and contribute their own visions of Utopia. None of this is actually apparent on stage: Instead six performers who deserve better (Tobi Bakare, Laura Elphinstone, Rufus Hound, Pamela Miles, Sophia Myles, David Whitaker) struggle through a substandard student revue, in which a number of sketches are split up and presented in installments over a long, boring, unfunny first hour. I struggled to see what most of them had to do with the subject matter; the rest tackled Utopia from a uniformly bleak perspective of how unattainable it, or anything close to it, is.