Theatre review: CARE

Alexander Zeldin's CARE takes place in a care home for the elderly, which Rosanna Vize's set design and James Farncombe's lighting bring to clinically realistic life, but with the odd flicker into something a bit eerier befitting a liminal space between life and death. Joan (Linda Bassett) arrives there after a fall damages her hip, believing that she'll be there for a few days at most until the physical injury recovers. But her daughter Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero) is already looking into making this a more permanent solution, as the accident was in part due to Joan's failing mental health, and the family can no longer trust that she won't be a danger to herself. As she spends her first few weeks in the home, an increasingly confused Joan does find some moments of joy as the residents share their life stories and highlights.

Theatre review: The Other Place

The National's currently got a full programme of shows that are as critically acclaimed as they are, frankly, bleak, and after the Dorfman's A Tupperware of Ashes and the Olivier's Coriolanus I'm completing the hat trick at the Lyttelton with Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place. Loosely (very loosely, which is why it's got a different title, Simon,) inspired by Antigone, the story's look at burial rites as a way of showing respect or contempt becomes one of how they're about saying goodbye, and how grief can turn into something toxic and twisted. Adam killed himself at his rural family home a few years ago; his brother Chris (Tobias Menzies) now owns it, and has kept the ashes there where he now lives with his new wife Erica (Nina Sosanya) and her teenager Leni (Lee Braithwaite,) as well as Adam's youngest daughter Issy (Alison Oliver) who moved back in when she couldn't pay her rent.

Theatre review: The Confessions

A British / Australian / Luxembourgish co-production, Alexander Zeldin's The Confessions, which he also directs at the Lyttelton, is based on conversations with his mother and her peers, and follows one woman's life from Australia in 1943 - when, as a child, she meets her father for the first time returning from the war and is confused because she thought the portrait of him on the wall was her father - to London in 2021, when she finally tells her son, who's been quizzing her just like the real author, to stop poking around for more details of her life. For the most part Amelda Brown narrates the story as the older Alice, while Eryn Jean Norvill plays her younger self in the scenes, but they occasionally trade places at particularly critical moments; perhaps Alice is so shaken by these events she steps out of her body, and can only confront them with the benefit of time.

Theatre review: Black Battles With Dogs

Southwark Playhouse's Vault space is drowned in haze for Bernard-Marie Koltès's Black Battles With Dogs, the lighting picking out four characters in and around a sealed-off compound in an unnamed African country. The cast features two former members of the RSC's Ensemble^TM: Supervisor Horn (Paul Hamilton) has been in Africa for some time, and stays there despite having lost his genitals in a local conflict. Cal (Joseph Arkley) is younger, more volatile, and fiercely racist towards the locals. They both work for a French construction company that is about to pull out of the area. A couple of days ago Cal shot a black worker and disposed of the body into a sewer. Now Alboury (Osi Okerafor,) claiming to be the dead man's brother, has arrived demanding the body be returned. Also in the camp is Leonie (Rebecca Smith-Williams,) a pretty but poor young Parisian girl who's planning to marry Horn for his money.