Theatre review: Table 17

Douglas Lyons' Table 17 opens with something of a personal theatrical nightmare for me: An announcement informing the audience that any time a character in the play asks a question, we are very much expected to answer it. The effect this has probably varies from performance to performance but, combined with the glitterball and pre-show soundtrack of hen night favourites, tonight it resulted in an evening of whooping, heckling, gasping, shrieking and yaaaas queening to make a 1980s American sitcom audience sound demure. And that was just the teenage boys. The question is, under the noise, did the show itself have much to say? A couple of years after their breakup, Dallas (Jamael Westman) has invited his ex-fiancée Jada (Marisha Wallace) out for a drink. We open with Jada fretting over what to wear for an evening that may or may not be a date.

Theatre review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Back to @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's learnt almost half the moves to the "Tragedy" dance, and a new revival of one of the definitive 20th century American classics. In Edward Albee's pitch-black 1962 tragicomedy Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Question Mark Gillian Anderson plays Martha, the daughter of the elderly president of a university. Her husband George (Billy Crudup) is a lecturer in the History department, briefly its head but only when all his other colleagues went off to World War II. Other than that it's been a pretty mediocre career, despite his marriage which was, at least partly, originally a strategic one to help him advance. The fact that it hasn't is just one of the disappointments that has made the relationship a sharp, bitter one, but strangely resilient.