Theatre review: Our Country's Good

After a few years away from its ubiquity about a decade ago, I'm going to guess Our Country's Good is back on the A'Level syllabus as it makes a return to the stage (and the school groups in the audience seemed very familiar with the play as well.) For Rachel O'Riordan's production at the Lyric Hammersmith Timberlake Wertenbaker has made some revisions to her most famous play, apparently to provide a more authentic voice to the speeches by the play's sole Australian First Nations character, who casts a detached, quizzical eye over the hordes of British men and women who've come off a fleet of ships. In addition to these text revisions, which I guess are the translations into Aboriginal dialect that pepper the speeches, instead of a man in traditional dress Killara (Naarah) is now a woman in modern clothes, witnessing the soldiers and convicts arriving in what will eventually become Sydney in the late 18th century.

Stage-to-screen review: The Old Man and the Pool

We're coming up to mid-September, traditionally the time when London theatre suddenly goes from a wasteland to a frantic stampede, so barring any unexpected health issues (whether global or personal) this should be the last of the current crop of screen and radio adaptations I use to pad out the dry season. Speaking of health issues, that's the focus of Mike Birbiglia's mix of stand-up and autobiographical storytelling, The Old Man and the Pool, which ran in London at Wyndham's Theatre a year ago. I'd been vaguely tempted but I do occasionally remember not to spend money I don't have on shows I'm not sure about I didn't book, and only a few months later Seth Barrish's production got added to Netflix anyway. Here the starting point is a medical check-up that reveals his regular breathing strength is the same as that of someone in the middle of a heart attack, and is advised to take up regular swimming.

Theatre review: Silence! The Musical

Despite Unfortunate from January remaining one of my favourite shows of this year so far, I'm generally not that enthused about the amount of parody musicals that seem to be ubiquitous at the moment. Still, I remembered enjoying Hunter Bell (book,) Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan's (music & lyrics) Silence Exclamation Mark The Musical when it made its London debut, so figured it would be worth revisiting as Christopher Gattelli's Edinburgh Fringe production moves straight to the Turbine Theatre. Although the story comes from Thomas Harris' original novel, this musical adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs is very much a direct spoof of Jonathan Demme's Oscar-hoovering 1991 film, as it makes very clear in its opening sequence of FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Phoebe Panaretos) slow-motion jogging, before launching into an impression of Jodie Foshter's very shpeshific vocal performanshe from the movie.

Theatre review: G

Teenagers Kai (Selorm Adonu,) his half-brother Khaleem (Ebenezer Gyau) and their friend Joy (Kadiesha Belgrave) have grown up knowing there's one part of their neighbourhood where they have to show utmost respect: A pair of pristine white trainers have hung from a power line over the road for the last 20 years, and the story goes that they belonged to a young black boy from their school, mistaken for a convenience store robber, who was run over by a car while fleeing police. His ghost, known as Baitface, wants revenge on the real criminal, so no young black boy should ever walk under the trainers without a balaclava on, in case the spirit should think he's the robber and destroy him - Joy's heard a rumour that Daniel Kaluuya recently walked under the trainers, and got retrospectively wiped from every film he ever made.