Theatre review: Captain Amazing

Captain Amazing dates from ten years ago, so it's just before playwright Alistair McDowell was a big enough name to get the budget for eldritch abominations, deep space mysteries and time-travelling mythical figures. But while it's a monologue dealing with very down-to-earth causes for joy and despair, it's still couched in terms of an SF world - in this case that of comic-book superheroes. Mark Weinman appears in jeans and a T-shirt, along with a long red cape as he takes us through a decade or so of the life of a man, also called Mark, who's been drunkenly pestering people in a club, insisting he's the titular hero. What led him to this point begins at his job in B&Q, helping a customer who will eventually become his wife. Sooner than they might have expected they become parents, and Mark is a devoted dad although not necessarily one who feels he knows what he's doing - especially once the marriage starts to break down.

Theatre review: The Glow

When Alistair McDowall says he prefers his plays to offer more questions than answers you should believe him: The playwright who's previously taken us into the Cthulhu mythos and to Pluto now appears to take us into a Victorian ghost story, before veering off into a whole new English* mythology. In 1863, self-styled spiritualist medium Evelyn (Rakie Ayola) is roaming the cells of an asylum in search of someone to use as a conduit in her séances. She finds a woman she names Sadie (Ria Zmitrowicz,) who's forgotten her own name and everything else about herself, and essentially kidnaps her, bringing her back to stay with her. The horror-movie feel is tempered with humour as Evelyn's brattish son Mason (Fisayo Akinade) throws tantrums at having to share the house with the new arrival, but he may have a point about the woman they really know nothing about.

Theatre review: X

A much-anticipated new play from Alistair McDowall, after his sleeper hit Pomona, and following the dark fantasy of that play he goes sci-fi for X, set on a research station on retired planet Pluto. Not that there's much there to research (the Americans get all the interesting missions) and even if there were Ray (Darrell D'Silva) and his team's contracts expired weeks ago - or possibly months, but the clock which keeps the base on Earth time is increasingly unreliable - it might have been much longer than they think. Ray second-in-command Gilda (Jessica Raine) is visibly feeling the strain, prone to regular panic attacks and tears, and snapping at her co-workers Cole (Rudi Dharmalingam) and Clark (James Harkness.) Surprisingly chipper is Mattie (Ria Zmitrowicz,) who rattles around in the ceiling taking care of the life support systems which she refers to as "the girls."

Theatre review: Pomona

A huge amount of Twitter buzz saw me make a last-minute trip to Richmond for Alistair McDowall's wildly surreal Pomona, a mix of urban thriller, epic fantasy quest and Lovecraftian horror. Ollie (Nadia Clifford) is searching for the identical twin sister who vanished some weeks earlier. There's also been a number of disappearances at the brothel where Fay (Rebecca Humphries) fled to after her policeman husband abused her. Both mysteries may find a solution in Pomona, a concrete island in the middle of Manchester isolated by canals and defunct train lines. Nobody seems to quite notice Pomona is even there, but just in case anyone gets curious the gangsters who make mysterious deliveries there have hired Moe (Sean Rigby) and Charlie (Sam Swann) as security guards. But their boss Gale (Grace Thurgood) now wants them to take a more hands-on role in the business.

Theatre review: Talk Show

After last week's all-female show, an all-male cast rounds off the Royal Court's weekly rep season, although a couple of absent women do loom large in Alistair McDowall's Talk Show, which Caroline Steinbeis directs. Three generations of unemployed men share a small house in an unnamed town that's been badly hit by the recession. Bill (Ferdy Roberts) has moved into the living room to let his ageing father Ron (Alan Williams) have his bedroom, while the basement is occupied by Bill's 26-year-old son Sam (Ryan Sampson.) With little else to do, Sam hosts a YouTube talk show every night, interviewing locals for the benefit of eight viewers (on a good night.) After one of these shows has wrapped up, a filthy, half-naked man (Jonjo O'Neill) crawls in through the basement window: It's his uncle Jonah, who's been missing for five years, and now wants Sam to hide him there for a while.

Non-review: Utopia

I can't call this a review as, for the first time this year, I couldn't handle the prospect of sitting through the whole of Utopia at Soho Theatre, so Andy and I left at the interval. Directors Steve Marmion and Max Roberts promised an ambitious project that invited a variety of writers, comedians, musicians and politicians to eschew art's tendency to look on the dark side. Instead they were to think positive and contribute their own visions of Utopia. None of this is actually apparent on stage: Instead six performers who deserve better (Tobi Bakare, Laura Elphinstone, Rufus Hound, Pamela Miles, Sophia Myles, David Whitaker) struggle through a substandard student revue, in which a number of sketches are split up and presented in installments over a long, boring, unfunny first hour. I struggled to see what most of them had to do with the subject matter; the rest tackled Utopia from a uniformly bleak perspective of how unattainable it, or anything close to it, is.