Theatre review: It's Headed Straight Towards Us

Closing off what's been a very strong week of theatre for me is a fairly starry premiere for the Park Theatre: Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer are the writers of disaster comedy It's Headed Straight Towards Us and I did wonder more than once if this was a project that the writers had been working on for a while, perhaps with the original intention of performing it themselves - I could certainly see Edmondson in the role that's ended up going to Rufus Hound. The setting is the luxury trailer of C-list actor Hugh (Samuel West,) never the most celebrated actor of his generation (no knighthood, only an MBE,) but having made a good living for himself in recent years as the butler to a volcano god in a cheesy but wildly successful action movie franchise. The latest installment is being filmed on the side of an actual Icelandic volcano*.

Theatre review:Once Upon A Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia

It's not often the main focus of war movies or other popular culture, so I'm probably not alone in finding where Africa fits into the Second World War something of a blind spot. If German officer Grandma (Adrian Edmondson) is to be believed, it was seen as a backwater during the War as well: He says the most promising Nazis are kept in Europe, and only the "animals" are sent to Africa where nobody's paying much attention to what they might get up to. Josh Azouz' Once Upon A Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia takes place in 1942, when officers like Grandma and his henchman Little Fella* (Daniel Rainford) presided over a somewhat precarious occupation: Their defeat of the hated French gave them some degree of sympathy with the Arab locals, but while there wasn't much resistance to the persecution of Jews in Tunis, neither did they find the enthusiastic allies they hoped for - perhaps because, under the Nazis' rhetoric supporting an independent nation, many knew that once they were done with the Jews, the Muslims would likely be next.

Stage-to-screen review: Twelfth Night(RSC / RST & Marquee TV)

Christopher Luscombe's Shakespeare productions tend to have a touch of the Merchant/Ivory to them, and so it is with this 2017 production of Twelfth Night, one of the few productions of the RSC's current run through the complete works that I'd missed until now, when it's just been added to Marquee TV's roster. Simon Higlett's set and costume designs are of a sumptious, solid kind a thrust stage like the RST rarely seems to need or bother with, and Nigel Hess' music is used like a movie score, much like he and Luscombe experimented with a decade earlier in their Merry Wives of Windsor for the Globe. The period movie they're making here is a Victorian one, where Shakespeare's fictional Illyrian coast becomes London and the countryside, by now comparatively easily accessible by train.

Theatre review: Neville's Island

Plugging a couple of months' hole in the Duke of York's programme is a seemingly last-minute transfer from Chichester: Neville's Island, Tim Firth's spoof of "stranded in nature" stories like Lord of the Flies. Four middle-managers from a Salford mineral water company are on a team-building expedition in the Lake District, but having elected Neville (Neil Morrissey) as team captain, he misreads the instructions and lands them on a tiny, uninhabited island downriver. Thanks to Angus' (Miles Jupp) seemingly bottomless rucksack they have no end of supplies, except for anything they might actually need - like food. After Roy (Robert Webb) had a nervous breakdown followed by a religious conversion, the others treat him with kid gloves in fear of setting him off again; everyone except Gordon (Adrian Edmondson) that is, whose default reaction to everything is sarcasm and disdain.