Theatre review: Summer 1954

The Browning Version is widely considered one of Terence Rattigan's masterpieces, but as a one-act play it seems to cause a lot of trouble for producers trying to pair it with something else as a double bill (Rattigan's own original choice of companion piece, Harlequinade, seems to be generally ruled out for being both too inferior and too big a shift in mood to work.) James Dacre's touring production Summer 1954 has mixed and matched it with a short from another of the playwright's double bills, Separate Tables, and so the new pairing opens at a Bournemouth hotel where most of the rooms are taken by semi-permanent residents. In Table Number Seven Siân Phillips plays the imperious Mrs Railton-Bell, who learns from the local paper that another resident, Major Pollock (Nathaniel Parker) isn't quite who he says he is.

Theatre review: A Lie of the Mind

I'm still a long way from being a fan of Sam Shepard's work but I've been getting on a lot better with the plays that have been revived this year. They're still quintessentially American, and a focus on what it means to be an American man is at the heart of them, but like in Buried Child there's a wider scope of interest and an unsettling edge of the surreal to A Lie of the Mind. Initially appearing to be about domestic violence, it becomes a spiral of insanity as the violent, unpredictable drunk Jake (Gethin Anthony) arrives at his brother's house claiming that he's beaten his wife to death. In fact Beth (Alexandra Dowling) is still alive, but the attack has left her with brain damage. Jake, too, seems to be out of his mind, the extremity of his violence leading to a nervous breakdown. Both of them get taken back to their parents' homes to recover, but neither house is really a good place for anyone's mental health.