Theatre review: Our Ajax

A figure of pure brute force, Ajax isn't one of the best-loved heroes of the Trojan War, better known nowadays for his bathroom scouring abilities. Timberlake Wertenbaker admits in her introduction to the playtext that Sophocles' play about him was hard for her to get to grips with. So her new version Our Ajax takes a different tack to most of her classical translations, more explicitly superimposing a modern story of Afghanistan over the one set in Troy - with only partial success. We first meet Ajax (Joe Dixon) dragging bloody corpses across the stage: When his nemesis Odysseus (Adam Riches) was promoted above him, Ajax snapped and murdered him and all his soldiers. Or so he thinks: In fact the goddess Athena (Gemma Chan) cast a confusion spell over him to protect Odysseus, and he actually slaughtered the allied army's goats and dogs.

Theatre review: A Thousand Miles of History

Last year the Royal Court did one of its Theatre Local seasons in the Bussey Building in Peckham, and the venue is now attempting to continue as a performance space. Although the third floor of a freezing building in a gloomy back alley off Rye Lane is perhaps a hard sell as a theatre, as evidenced by tonight's turnout: A Thousand Miles of History may be flawed, but it deserves an audience bigger than the seven people¹ it got tonight. Harold Finley's play looks at the rise and fall of two of the biggest New York artists of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat (Michael Walters) and Keith Haring (Simon Ginty.) In a white warehouse space, hung with blank canvases in Mike Lees' design, Basquiat and Haring are friends who take the art scene by storm, blocking from their minds the knowledge that being the height of fashion means an inevitable fall from favour is coming.