Theatre review: BRACE BRACE

My last trip to David Byrne's (not that one) first season at the Royal Court is for Oli Forsyth's BRACE BRACE, the story of a young couple surviving a hijacking only to face unexpected consequences in the rest of their lives, and Daniel Raggett's production which ramps up the tension and twists - but can't disguise the gaping plot holes. Sylvia (Anjana Vasan) and Ray (Phil Dunster*) are flying to their honeymoon when a lone, mentally ill man manages to take over the plane, briefly looking like he'll bring it down. Ray gets knocked out when trying to stop the hijacker but Sylvia manages to defeat him, becoming a popular have-a-go hero in the press. Inevitably it puts a strain on their relationship, and at first it looks like this will take the form of Ray's wounded pride at being written out of the story in favour of his wife as sole heroine, while she takes it in her stride.

Theatre review: The New Real

My relationship with David Edgar's plays has been mixed: I think my still-strong memories of enjoying Pentecost in the '90s make me always want to give his new work a try, but the RSC's most-commissioned modern writer was also responsible for the notoriously dreary Written on the Heart, and after last week's meh Here In America I felt a bit of trepidation towards the second of his premieres this autumn. The New Real is also described by the blurb as both "epic" and "panoramic," so they're really making sure you know it's going to be long. Still, my first show at Stratford's The Other Place since it was serving as The Courtyard twelve years ago turns out to be flawed, but worth checking out. Edgar returns to Eastern Europe and an unnamed former Soviet state, in a story spanning the last 22 years and looking at the question that has been worrying many political playwrights: How did politics move so far to the Right and so far from reality in that time?

Theatre review: Coriolanus (National Theatre)

This year's National Theatre Shakespeare is a fairly rarely-performed one, and one that I'm generally pretty happy to have stay that way; it does though get a big selling point in David Oyelowo making a long-awaited return to the stage to play Coriolanus. Set in the days of the Roman Republic, Oyelowo's Caius Martius is a nobleman and general who earned his titular surname by almost single-handedly sacking the city of Coriolis, stronghold of the enemy Volscians. On his return to Rome, among the honours heaped on him is the expectation that the next stage in his career will be election as Consul, a position of considerable political power. But first he has to gain the support of the public, whose Tribunes Sicinius and Brutus (Stephanie Street and Jordan Metcalfe) are determined to show him up as unsuitable for power.

Theatre review: A Tupperware of Ashes

The Dorfman's about to go dark for a while for another refurb, but it bows out for now in style with a show reminiscent of The Father, both in subject matter and in being something I was very glad to catch, but wouldn't want to put myself through again in a hurry. In Tanika Gupta's A Tupperware of Ashes Meera Syal plays Queenie, a name whose significance is obscure to start with, but which becomes clearer as Gupta gives us a loose reimagining of King Lear, charting the tragic mental breakdown of an independent, successful British-Bengali woman. Queenie is a chef with her own, recently Michelin-starred restaurant, although some of the things we learn about her success early on in the play come into question soon after: Her behaviour has started to change quite a lot, and her doctor daughter Kamala's (Natalie Dew) worst suspicions are confirmed when she sends her off for tests.

Theatre review: White Rabbit Red Rabbit

I've seen Nassim Soleimanpour's second and third plays structured as cold reads for a different performer every night, but had missed his original hit which, out of necessity, created his signature format in the first place. But following the run of ECHO at the Royal Court a couple of months ago, White Rabbit Red Rabbit now returns for an equally starry West End run at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's recently invested heavily in Global Hypercolor shares. This afternoon the comedian, actor and rapper Ben Bailey-Smith was the guest reader of Soleimanpour's script, something which threatened to derail what turns out to be a pretty dark tale, as a couple of audience members seemed to think they were at a gig and proceeded to heckle him. Fortunately they soon got the message that Bailey-Smith had a script to stick to. In subsequent shows Soleimanpour has expanded on the concept to add himself to the action remotely, but here we get the format in its purest form.

Theatre review: Here in America

It seems a long time since I saw a David Edgar play and all of a sudden he's got two new ones out; first up at the Orange Tree is Here In America, a look at the friendship and professional relationship between playwright Arthur Miller and his regular director Elia Kazan, and how it was strained by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which called them both to testify with very different outcomes. Although the play makes no disguise of who the characters are, they all go by nicknames: Kazan goes by Gadg, short for Gadget (Shaun Evans,) who's invited Art (Michael Aloni) to his house to look at cheese, and to confess to him that he's about to go in front of HUAC to name members of their theatre company who were communists alongside him. Of the two, Art was never actually a card-carrying party member, but he's the one who's still held onto the strongest anti-capitalist beliefs, as well as the sense of honour in not betraying his friends.

Theatre review: The Real Ones

The creative team behind The P Word return to the Bush for what feels like another autobiographical story from Waleed Akhtar - especially given that both leads are aspiring playwrights - about life as a gay British-Pakistani man. This time the scope feels wider though, as it takes us through the sometimes melancholy story of a close friendship over almost twenty years. Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) were friends at school, but only become especially close at the age of 19, when we first meet them: Zaid has moved away to study, and as her parents have only allowed her to go to a local university so she can stay at home, visiting him (while pretending to be on a getaway for young Muslim girls) is one of the only ways Neelam can expand her horizons. Their parents' expectations are something that follow them for much of the story - Akhtar's play is called The Real Ones, and at times it feels as if it's only with each other that they show their real selves.

Theatre review: Bellringers

Bellringers may answer an eternal theatrical question: What if Beckett, but bearable? I have to say my heart sank early on in Daisy Hall's play, as its two male characters, lifelong, loving friends, ponder the big questions of life, death and the universe in a roundabout, chatty manner - the debt to Waiting for Godot is hard to miss. So it was especially heartening to go on to see Hall hold the attention in a way Beckett's never managed for me. Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) are in the belltower of their village's church during a violent thunderstorm, the kind that's been laying waste to all the towns in the area for some time now. Someone has to be up there to ring the bells when the storm comes directly overhead, to scare away the thunder and lightning, but it's the most dangerous job as it's the place most likely to be struck, so the villagers do it on a rota system.

Theatre review: Giant

I know I say it all the time but here comes another play set in the past that feels alarmingly relevant to the present: No, not a beloved children's author turning out to be a bit fash, but Israeli attacks on Palestine and Lebanon that draw out arguments on both sides, and the question of how to criticise the actions of a state created for a specific religion, without criticising the religion itself. Not that this was a particular concern for Roald Dahl: Mark Rosenblatt's Giant is set in 1983, when the author was under fire for publishing a review of a book about Middle Eastern politics, in which his criticism of Israel's actions came couched in much broader Antisemitic sentiment. We meet Dahl (John Lithgow) in cranky mood, where it seems his biggest concerns are the noisy remodelling of his house, and his suspicion that illustrator Quentin Blake is getting a larger share of his royalties than he deems fair.

Theatre review: Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist

A few days after the official follow-up to SIX, I'm off to a show with a different creative team (including some big names in its development process so far) but which has clear - perhaps way too clear - ambitions to follow in its footsteps. Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist also features a famous historical queen with a detachable head, Zizi Strallen (part of the Z-series of Strallens that also includes Zoltar, Zuzan and Zabulon) taking on the title role, and even casts original West End SIX stars Renée Lamb and Millie O'Connell, but things haven't panned out quite as well so far: The official line is that Cake's ticket sales were so bad the run got cut short before it had even had a press night, so the Sunday matinée I'd booked turned out to be the penultimate performance.

Theatre review: Here You Come Again

Dolly Parton is hardly a stranger to writing entire new musicals of her own, but her extensive back catalogue means she'll always be an attractive prospect for the jukebox musical treatment as well. Bruce Vilanch, Gabriel Barre and Tricia Paoluccio's Here You Come Again has already had successful runs in the US, and for its first UK national tour it also gets a rewrite from Jonathan Harvey to provide a new setting and some gags that'll make more sense to British audiences. For tonight's performance on the Richmond leg of the tour it also gets a seemingly last-minute change of gender as Kevin, a middle-aged gay man, has been changed to Kerry, a middle-aged lesbian, although to be fair that doesn't make it any less likely that the lead will be a huge Dolly Parton fan. Charlotte Yorke, who usually understudies Dolly, plays Kerry, a wannabe standup comedian whose girlfriend has dumped her in the middle of the Covid lockdown in summer 2020.

Theatre review: Why Am I So Single?

Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss' SIX was very much an outlier in how modern musical theatre hits tend to be made: A small-scale musical written at university and taken to Edinburgh, it currently stands as a long-runner both in the West End and on Broadway, with its fanbase making its songs a streaming juggernaut as well. So with the team a firmly established one, launching a new musical straight into the West End comes with very different expectations, and surely the most high profile theatrical case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome in many years. So the premise of follow-up Why Am I So Single Question Mark feels audacious in just how basic it is: A pair of characters directly and explicitly modelled on Marlow & Moss have a case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome, and decide to base their next musical on their daily lives.

Theatre review: A Face in the Crowd

Kwame Kwei-Armah's final directing job at the Young Vic is a new musical by Elvis Costello (music and lyrics) and Sarah Ruhl (book,) that adapts the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd. Judging by the Wikipedia summary of Elia Kazan's film, some liberties have been taken with the plot to make it even more topically relevant, but it certainly seems like this was a story that called out for revisiting in a year full of high-profile elections. Marcia Jeffries (Anoushka Lucas) is a small-town radio host whose show focuses on regular people whose voices don't usually get heard - like the inmates of the county jail, where she finds Lonesome Rhodes (Ramin Karimloo,) being held for drunk and disorderly behaviour. When he sings a song that charms both her and her listeners she invites him to become a regular contributor, and within weeks his hokey folk wisdom has made him the star of the show.

Theatre review: Princess Essex

Like most years the Globe ends its summer season with a new play, usually one that looks at historical events filtered through very modern concerns. Anne Odeke's Princess Essex doesn't buck that trend: Filling in the gaps in a true story many of whose details remain unknown, the play is inspired by a woman calling herself Princess Dinubolu of Senegal, the first black woman to compete in an English beauty pageant. So the play at times takes unflinching looks at issues of racial discrimination, particularly standards of perceived beauty, colonialism and racial fetishisation; but it does so mostly in the context of a pretty broad and bright comedy, which Robin Belfield's production approaches with energy and tongue in cheek. Odeke plays Joanna, a mixed-race housekeeper who knows nothing about her parents or early life, except that she ended up in the entertainment capital of the world: Southend-on-Sea.

Theatre review: Julius Caesar(Icarus / Southwark Playhouse)

I wonder if Julius Caesar is another play that's currently on the syllabus, as Southwark Playhouse had a production from Lazarus Theatre Company scheduled which fell through; instead of cancelling, they replaced it with a completely different production of the same Shakespeare play from Icarus Theatre Collective, a company specialising in creative captioning who've previously presented Ionesco at the venue. Max Lewendel's production has apparently gone through extensive R&D, something I wish I could say was better reflected in what's ended up on stage in The Large. Instead we're in a dystopian future, one theoretically embedded in very modern concerns about AI and online mobs, but in design more obviously rooted in the kind of 1980s sci-fi that tried to remake Mad Max on a 30p budget.

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.

Radio review: Love and Information

Back to my occasional reviews of radio adaptations of stage work, where BBC Radio 3's recent production of Love and Information is the first audio adaptation, and 12 years seems like a surprisingly long time to wait to give it that treatment: After all, Caryl Churchill's 2012 play is an experiment in form that requires all kinds of resources for a live revival, that are a lot easier to get around on radio, where sketch shows are common. And that's essentially the format Churchill used for this play, whose cast very quickly run their way through more than a hundred characters in over fifty scenes that are rarely as long as two minutes, and can be as short as a single sneeze. As an audience member, one advantage this has is that I was able to focus entirely on the scenes and not the staging - I remember the original production at the Royal Court as being brilliant, but it was impossible not to be slightly distracted by the impressively slick scene changes.

Theatre review: Antony & Cleopatra(Shakespeare's Globe)

One of my A'Level English Shakespeares, and not one I've ever loved, Antony & Cleopatra had my favourite-ever production at the Globe. The latest revival's publicity makes a point of the fact that it's ten years since it was last seen there, but that wasn't the original intention: It was first announced that Deaf actress and familiar face at the venue Nadia Nadarajah would play the Queen of Egypt in 2020, in what was also meant to be that year's Michelle Terry-starrer in an unannounced role. I guess the Artistic Director might have been eyeing up Antony, but my bet would have been Cleopatra's chief lady in waiting Charmian, allowing her to translate from British Sign Language to English and back. If my guess was right then the four-year delay caused by lockdown made for a different high concept for Blanche McIntyre's production, which still stars Nadarajah as Cleopatra, but has her joined by a number of other D/deaf performers for a fully bilingual production.

Theatre review: Pericles(RSC/Swan & Chicago Shakespeare Theater)

The new RSC team's first season ends with half an Artistic Director finally making a debut as unlikely and understated as the rest of the summer run has been: One of the most obscure plays to just about scrape into the canon, the one Shakespeare himself was so invested in he entrusted half the writing to some pimp he met down the pub. Tamara Harvey hasn't directed at the RSC before, so starting in the smaller Swan also seems a sensibly measured way of getting used to the company's deep thrust stages. In context though there is something audacious about the choice of Pericles as her opening salvo - a play perceived as so unpopular that both her predecessors dealt with it by announcing they were going to stage it, then hoping nobody would notice when they didn't. In this meandering late romance Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch) sets out on a variety of fairytale quests to win princesses with, it's probably fair to say, varying results.

Stage-to-screen review: Tartuffe (BBC iPlayer)

Next up in my digital theatre catch-up is a production I'm pretty sure I had been due to see at the RSC's Swan, but had to skip when I got ill. A couple of years later Iqbal Khan's production of Tartuffe moved up to Birmingham, where Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto's adaptation is set, and that's where it was filmed for the BBC. Molière's farce is a satire on religious hypocrisy, and here the con-man posing as a holy man becomes a fake Imam, manipulating and destroying a well-off British-Pakistani family for his own ends. In place of a servant we have a Bosnian cleaning lady, Darina (Olga Fedori,) who acts as a chorus figure and outside eye on the Pervaiz family, whose patriarch Imran (Simon Nagra) has been charmed by the wise and pious words of a seemingly homeless man he met at the mosque. He's invited him to live in the family home, and pretty soon he's reliant on Tartuffe's words for every decision he makes in his life.

Stage-to-screen review: Macbeth (See-Saw Films)

Once again a quiet August sees me throw a few screen versions of stage plays into the mix, and as the 2015 version of Macbeth is about to expire on Netflix I thought if I was going to bother with it at all I'd better get on with it. Set very much in the grubby middle ages of the story's inspiration, Justin Kurzel's film opens with the titular couple burying a child, so we can get that particular clichéd misreading of the text out of the way early on. To be fair this is only really offered as an explanation for Lady Macbeth's (Marion Cotillard) actions, as Macbeth's (Michael Fassbender) seem very much motivated by PTSD and the general bloody ruthlessness of the times: The action properly begins with the gruesome battle he leads to victory; it's actually during the battle that he first spots the three witches (who are seemingly Romulans?) who'll eventually prophesy his rise to the throne of Scotland.

Theatre review: Peanut Butter & Blueberries

The Kiln ends the summer, and Indhu Rubasingham's time at the helm, with a very gentle take on the romantic comedy format: Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan's debut play sees a pair of Pakistani-British students at SOAS (a London university specialising in Asian, African and Middle-Eastern studies) who bond over both feeling a long way from home: Hafsah (Humera Syed) is a strict Muslim from Bradford and doesn't believe in dating before marriage - although she also doesn't really believe in marriage anyway, having seen how most of them seem to work out. She initially (accurately) sums up Bilal (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain) as "the kind of Bilal who lets white people call him Billy," but his strong Pakistani-Brummie accent means she doesn't dismiss him completely: He too is more religious than he initially appears but with complicated feelings on relationships (his entire experience of Pakistani dads is that they leave their families, and he doesn't want to become part of that pattern.)

Theatre review: Police Cops in Space

In an otherwise very quiet August as all attention is back on Edinburgh, there was no way I was going to miss the return of the team from my Show of the Year 2023: After the success of Police Cops the Musical which has (so far) played two runs at Southwark Playhouse, the writer-performer team of Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe has gone back to their lo-fi roots: In what feels, given the late announcement, like it might have been plugging a scheduling gap at the Underbelly Festival, they've revived their 2017 show Police Cops in Space. This means just the original trio, minimal comedy props but actually quite a lot of comedy costumes - given Roe's almost complete inability to do the quick-changes without clattering onto the stage with his trousers halfway down his legs. This is not a complaint.

Theatre review: The School for Scandal

Continuing the new RSC artistic team's unpredictable approach to an opening season we have a rare main stage outing for Restoration Comedy, that genre made up of such a tangle of mini-plots it always defeats my attempts to provide anything like a coherent synopsis. But it's probably accurate enough to say the main focus of all the shenanigans in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal is a pair of brothers, young adults but still theoretically being kept an eye on by family friend Sir Peter Teazle (Geoffrey Streatfeild) since their father's death: Charles Surface (John Leader) is the party-animal youngest, who's already got through his share of the inheritance and has sold off half the contents of his house. But a lot of his financial mismanagement comes from his generosity to friends and strangers alike, and he's essentially kind-hearted - something his public image doesn't really reflect.

Theatre review: Slave Play

A play that had been causing a commotion in New York just before Covid caused a different kind, I'd been looking forward to Jeremy O. Harris' Slave Play, whose reputation for courting controversy with audacity preceded it. I don't know that it had done so to a wide enough audience to merit opening directly in the West End, but a bit of celebrity casting - and ensuring everyone knew the celebrity in question would be getting his parts out - must have made that seem like less of a gamble. While I try to avoid details about shows I haven't seen, I think the basic premise is pretty well known now - the fact that all the production photos come from the second act suggests the producers have given up on what's really going on in the first being a secret: We open on an antebellum plantation with slave Kaneisha (Olivia Washington) being brutalised by overseer Jim (Kit Harington.)

Theatre review: Hello Dolly!

Recently-upgraded Dame Imelda Staunton finally gets to take the title role in Jerry Herman (music & lyrics) and Michael Stewart's (book) Hello Dolly Exclamation Mark: Dominic Cooke's production is another holdover from 2020, delayed even further by the leading lady's prior commitment to try and elicit sympathy for the Queen having to give up her favourite yacht. In an unusually widow-heavy Broadway classic, Dolly Levi has dealt with the loss of her husband by throwing herself into matchmaking. But after several years she's decided she's finally ready to find a new match for herself - except the man she's decided on has already engaged her services to find him someone else. Scrooge-like Yonkers shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder (Andy Nyman) is the half-a-millionnaire she'd originally matched with New York milliner Irene Molloy (Jenna Russell.)

Theatre review: The Grapes of Wrath

It turns out The Grapes of Wrath isn't actually about haemorrhoids - John Steinbeck's Great American Novel^TM, in an adaptation by Frank Galati which Carrie Cracknell revives at the Lyttelton, wouldn't be dealing with anything as light-hearted as that. Instead this is a definitive story of the Great Depression, and the production opens with a dramatic, balletic series of scenes (movement direction by Ira Mandela Siobhan) showing the wind ravaging the people and the overfarmed land, creating the famous Dust Bowl which left farming families across America without an income. We follow the extended Joad family, led by the endlessly kind Ma (Cherry Jones) and terminally passive Pa (Greg Hicks,) as they drive to California where, according to flyers that have been distributed across the country, there are many good jobs to be found picking peaches and grapes.

Theatre review: After Sex

Siofra Dromgoole's After Sex follows a casual couple navigating whether and how to make their relationship something more concrete, entirely through the conversations they have after sex - it's not a conceit the playwright sticks to entirely religiously, but it does offer a slightly new way of looking at a frequently-covered subject. We meet Her (Antonia Salib) and Him (Azan Ahmed) just after the first time they had sex (and a little bit during the second,) having met at work and decided to try something no-strings-attached. It's a short play, but it would be even shorter if they didn't find that strings were attaching themselves pretty quickly whether they like it or not, and pretty soon they're both betraying the fact that part of them is already imagining a longer-term future together; usually when they're most enthusiastically trying to protest to the contrary.

Theatre review: Fangirls

Turns out July is the month of imported shows about 14-year-old girls kidnapping celebrities, as the Lyric Hammersmith hosts the UK premiere of Australian musical Fangirls. Yve Blake's (book, music and lyrics) show centres on fans of a fictional boyband star whose similarity to any real persons living or dead is, I'm sure, purely coincidental: Harry (Thomas Grant) auditioned for a British talent show that turned him down for being too young to compete solo, but instead put him in a manufactured boyband that went on to conquer the world (my lowkey favourite gag in the show was the band being called Heartbreak Nation, which is such an accurately half-hearted combination of two random words for a manufactured X Factor boyband.) Edna (Jasmine Elcock) is a Sydney teenager who spends hours on her computer reading and writing Harry fanfic.

Theatre review: The Hot Wing King

The Pulitzer drama prize continues to try and get me back on side, with its 2021 award going to a writer I've liked for a long time, Katori Hall. The Hot Wing King's take on the hot-button topic of masculinity, and particularly black masculinity, is a refreshingly different one as it centres the action around a found family of gay men: After five years in a long-distance relationship Cordell (Kadiff Kirwan) moved from St Louis to Memphis to be with boyfriend Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Rhoden,) leaving everything behind including a wife and two children. The play takes place over the weekend of the annual Hot Wing Contest, a cook-out Cordell has come close to winning but never quite achieved before, and as ever they're joined by their friends, the flamboyant Isom (Olisa Odele) and more reserved, sports-loving Big Charles (Jason Barnett,) to help them put together the recipes Cordell has perfected over the last year.

Theatre review: ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen)

In keeping with his usual theatrical style, originally developed when he was denied a passport and couldn't perform his shows himself, Nassim Soleimanpour uses a different actor as his proxy for every performance, allowing him to have someone make a connection with the audience even if he can't do so in person. Unusually, for his latest play ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) the full schedule of guest stars was revealed in advance, and given there's now a message on the website saying that no, you can't have a free ticket exchange to a different night, the Royal Court might be regretting that as, presumably, they're getting inundated with calls demanding they see Jodie Whittaker or Toby Jones. Tonight's guest National Treasure was Meera Syal, who at least would have had some idea what she was getting herself into as it transpires she's done one of Soleimanpour's previous shows: The playwright was excited as that had been the performance his wife caught, and she'd gushed about Syal's performance.

Theatre review: Red Speedo

Well I didn't have weaponising "You Got It" on my Bingo card of what theatres would try this year, but that's what Matthew Dunster's production of Red Speedo does, replaying the song on a constant loop before the show begins, before ramping up the volume to levels even an Orange Tree matinée audience should have been able to hear. At least it's better than those ten-second sound loops I've had at some shows, and it turns out Roy Orbison's song is such a banger I was still tapping my feet to it by the seventh or eighth repetition. On-topic lyrics aside, I was expecting a reference to this being a motivational aid the protagonist listened to before a race, but nothing so specific transpired to explain the choice. Holly Khan's sound design also goes in for a loud klaxon to mark the start and end of every scene, echoing the way Olympic swimming races are started, and giving the audience an occasional jolt.

Theatre review: The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare's Globe)

There's only really two things wrong with The Taming of the Shrew: One of them is half the plot, and the other is the other half. In Padua, the beautiful Bianca (Sophie Mercell) has many suitors, including the wealthy locals Gremio (Nigel Barrett) and Hortensio (Lizzie Hopley,) and recently-arrived Lucentio (Yasmin Taheri.) They compete for Bianca's hand in a needlessly convoluted scheme involving assuming fake identities, swapping around real identities, and a steadfast refusal to say a single funny line. The other storyline gives the play its title, as Bianca is not allowed to get married until her older sister Katherina (Thalissa Teixeira) does, and as she's considered a difficult woman, it seems she never will. So Hortensio recruits his mercenary friend Petruchio (Andrew Leung) to marry Katherina (it's not like she has any say in the matter) and once that's done he proceeds to bend her to his will through a sustained campaign of gaslighting and literal torture as defined by the UN.

Theatre review: Skeleton Crew

Michael Longhurst's run at the Donald and Margot Warehouse ends with something of a whimper, as the original play scheduled to close his tenure had to be cancelled - I think for contractual reasons - and instead director Matthew Xia was given Dominique Morisseau's Skeleton Crew. It's a play that does feel connected to the last few years at the venue, which have included two Lynn Nottage plays about the decline of American industry in the 2000s, but while the themes are similar Morisseau doesn't quite have the spark to her writing that elevates Nottage. Set in the break room of the last small car factory left in Detroit in 2008, the workforce have been pared back to a bare minimum but the four employees we meet are trying to convince themselves that the factory's closure in the next couple of years isn't as inevitable as it looks.

Theatre review: Alma Mater

Is it something that personally targets just me, or does the Almeida have a particularly unlucky track record of illness among its actors? I worked out that over the last eight years I've had to reschedule three shows there, miss one entirely, and have one performance meant to be a few weeks into the run turn into an early preview after the original star was replaced. The only comparable run of bad luck I can remember is when any RSC actor who went anywhere near a bicycle was guaranteed at least one fracture. Come to think of it that was around the time current Almeida boss Rupert Goold was at the RSC. Has Gooldilocks been a jinx all along? Making that third entry onto the list of rescheduled visits is Kendall Feaver's Alma Mater which had to replace original star Lia Williams with Justine Mitchell at short notice. Additionally, Nathalie Armin was indisposed today, so the supporting role of Leila had to be read in by Assistant Director Connie Trieves tonight.

Theatre review: Grud

After being developed at a Hampstead Theatre playwrighting scheme (back when Hampstead had development money,) Sarah Power's Grud now receives a distracting staging from Jaz Woodcock-Stewart in the Downstairs studio space. Bo (Catherine Ashdown) is a socially-uncomfortable science geek with no friends at her sixth-form college, until she meets the equally eccentric but more hyper Aicha (Kadiesha Belgrave,) the only other member of their school's space club. As they attempt to build a working miniature replica of a device that's about to be launched into space to do tests, the two girls do quickly feel affection for each other, but Aicha is a lot more enthusiastic about showing that she's excited to have made a friend on her level. Bo's mixture of not knowing how to behave around people, and not wanting to get too close to anyone, comes from growing up with her alcoholic single father.

Theatre review: Mean Girls

The audience at the Savoy Theatre were largely decked out in pink today. Security let them all in, but frankly they were lucky, considering it's not Wednesday. Tina Fey's (book) musical adaptation of her endlessly quotable 2004 film with Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics) finally makes it to the West End, and the new Mean Girls doesn't disappoint: Cady Heron (Charlie Burn) goes from being home-schooled by her mother in Kenya to being thrown into the deep end of an American High School. Her guides to the convoluted class hierarchy are queer outsiders Janis (Elena Skye) and Damian (understudy Freddie Clements) but the social group she ends up joining is the Plastics, when she catches the attention of their fearsome leader Regina George (Georgina Castle.) Cady's been warned about the school's ruthless alpha pack, but thinks she can study them from the inside by treating them as the lions she watched in Africa.

Theatre review: I'm Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire

Turning Misery into (more of) a black comedy, Samantha Hurley's New York hit I'm Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire transfers to Southwark Playhouse with its original director, designer and leading lady - the latter's performance being a big part of what sells... whatever it is that's going on here. Set in 2004, around the time that the internet started to be fast enough and ubiquitous enough to help blur the lines between fandom and stalking, Shelby Hinkley (Tessa Albertson) is the 14-year-old president of the Tobey Maguire fan club, whose regular video messages to members include an update on the actor's current whereabouts. It turns out she's got a specific plan for this information though, and when Tobey (Anders Hayward) gets anaesthetised to get his wisdom teeth removed, she's ready to grab him from an LA dentist's practice, stuff him in a duffle bag and onto a coach, and chain him up in her basement in South Dakota.

Theatre review: Your Lie In April

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: As all seats for Your Lie In April's preview period are being sold at the same price, I wasn't going to miss the chance to see a show in a West End theatre from a seat where the stage was actually visible, so I went before the official press night.

For the latest in the West End's unofficial East Asian season the Harold Pinter Theatre is decked out in the familiar cherry blossom so we know we're back in Japan: Your Lie In April is based on Naoshi Arakawa's popular teen romance manga, which makes it an interesting contrast to last week's Marie Curie, a Korean take on a European story that very much followed a Western musical template: Here a largely Western creative team takes on a Japanese storytelling tradition, and while Frank Wildhorn (music,) Carly Robyn Green and Tracy Miller (lyrics,) Riko Sakaguchi and Rinne B Groff (book) offer up another slice of Broadway-friendly music, Nick Winston and Jordan Murphy's production maintains a cartoonish feel that reminds us of its comic book origins with a distinctively Japanese flavour of cheese.

Theatre review: A View From The Bridge

It's ten years since Ivo van Hove's production of A View From The Bridge not only made a star of the Belgian director in London and New York, but also tangibly influenced the way a lot of theatre has been approached since then. It feels a lot more recent than a decade, but then all that influence is probably part of that (along with the fact that I have seen it a bit more recently than that, as a streamed recording during lockdown.) So in some respects it probably is time for someone to revisit Arthur Miller's domestic tragedy as a whole new generation can see it with fresh eyes; but for many of us it'll be slightly odd to see a production that keeps the original details and trappings of post-War New York, where Italian-American families live under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and work - when they can find work - loading and unloading ships on the docks.

Theatre review: Marie Curie

The latest in the West End's influx of East Asian theatre is a South Korean musical, although I'm not sure it heralds a K-Musical revolution to match the popularity of K-Pop or K-Drama - not until the genre develops as distinctive an identity to make it stand out. Jongyoon Choi (music) and Seeun Choun's (book & lyrics) Marie Curie, in an English version by Tom Ramsey (book) and Emma Fraser (arrangements & lyrics) follows Marie Skłodowska (Ailsa Davidson) as she travels from her native Poland to France, where she'll be the only female student of science at the Sorbonne. On the train journey she meets Anne Kowalska (Chrissie Bhima,) who's planning to get factory work, and will become a lifelong friend and link back to her beloved homeland.

Theatre review: The Bounds

I often talk about weirdly specific themes that come around in theatre, and this year we're getting one that's also specific to a venue: After Gunter, the Royal Court Upstairs once again gives us a play about mediaeval football matches between entire villages that could go on for days and risked turning violent - in a story with an undercurrent of witchcraft. The characters in Stewart Pringle's The Bounds don't actually get anywhere near enough the action to get injured by it, which isn't to say you feel confident they won't come to harm: On the outskirts of the Northumberland village of Allendale, Percy (Ryan Nolan) and Rowan (Lauren Waine) have taken their places for the annual Whitsun match against hated local rivals Catton. But in practice they're essentially spectators, and not even in a good location: They're clearly not star players, and have been ditched somewhere so far out of the way that even a game that takes place over several miles is unlikely to reach them.

Theatre review: Some Demon

Apart from when things went a bit chaotic circa Covid, I think I've pretty much kept up with every Papatango winner for the last decade - the playwrighting contest has come up with some very impressive work, even if I've always suspected that it doesn't hurt your chances if the subject's a depressing one. In other news, this year Laura Waldren's Some Demon is set in an eating disorder inpatient clinic, and takes its title from a Nietzche quote. Zoe (Sirine Saba) has been in and out of institutions like this one for the last decade; her current stay seems to be a particularly long one, as she alternates between making progress and even becoming a helpful and maternal figure to the other residents, and sabotaging both her own treatment and other people's. Right now she's getting impatient with Mara (Leah Brotherhead,) whose tantrums and screaming fits are disrupting group sessions during the day, and keeping everyone awake at night.

Theatre review: Babies

The Other Palace has managed to combine its remit to discover new British musicals with the high school musicals that have been its bread and butter in recent years: Martha Geelan (book) and Jack Godfrey's (music & lyrics) Babies isn't even an adaptation of an existing property, although its premise has been a mainstay of teen TV drama since even I was a teenager: Back then it would most likely have been an egg that each of a class full of kids would have been given to look after as if it was a baby; here Year 11 are delivered a shipment of hi-tech Japanese dolls that cry like real infants and need feeding and care. The class have to look after them for a week while juggling all their usual schoolwork, a cautionary project meant to put them off becoming single teen parents for real, as the entirety of the year above them seem to have done.

Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (RSC/RST)

Known for being particularly good with some of the lesser-loved Shakespeares, Blanche McIntyre returns to Stratford-upon-Avon for the new RSC regime's first season. And in the first half at least, The Merry Wives of Windsor justifies its place as very few people's favourite: While the popular myth of Elizabeth I demanding to see Falstaff in love seems very unlikely, it does feel probable that this Henry IV spin-off was written because of popular demand, and its mix of characters from a very different world with a whole bunch of new comic foils begins as a tangle of plots, tricks and misunderstandings. There's even a very tedious version of the Twelfth Night subplot about convincing two different types of idiot that the other wants to duel them to the death, which even the characters get openly and mercifully bored with and ditch after the first couple of acts.

Theatre review: English

Marking both one of the last shows from Indhu Rubasingham at the Kiln, and one of the first from the Harvey/Evans regime at the RSC, this co-production of Sanaz Toossi's English is a great reflection on both companies. A play about language and identity, this was the 2023 Pulitzer winner for drama, and marks another year to buck the trend of underwhelming winners of that prize. Some while ago Marjan (Nadia Albina) spent nine years living in Manchester, before returning to her native Iran. She's married and settled now, but is constantly trying to reconnect with how she felt then, which she does by teaching English classes. Over a five-week course she helps four adults prepare for their TOEFL exam in a classroom she optimistically announces will be a Farsi-free zone (the fact that the play uses the conceit of the actors speaking English in Iranian accents, with "Farsi" represented by English in their own accents, tells you how successful they are at sticking to this.)

Theatre review:Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White

Alice Childress' 1966 play about segregation Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White is set in South Carolina in 1918, and the fact that it's the final year of the First World War is a constant underlying theme: Black soldiers like Lula's (Diveen Henry) adopted son Nelson (Patrick Martins) and sailors like Mattie's (Bethan Mary-James) husband are fighting the same as white Americans and risking their lives the same, but in an upcoming celebration Nelson will, like the rest of the black troops, have to add himself to the end of the parade uninvited; and when the war ends, however much they try to convince themselves otherwise, they know their contribution won't be recognised by allowing them into the spaces they're currently forbidden from. But if Lula and Mattie think they've seen it all, their new neighbour will confront them with one more taboo.