Theatre review: The Unfriend

Former Doctor Who and Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat goes back to his sitcom roots for his playwrighting debut, and brings along some more TV connections - his regular collaborator Mark Gatiss directs black comedy The Unfriend, first seen in Chichester and now transferring to the Criterion. It mines familiar comic territory by throwing some truly objectionable people on stage together, and some of the characters aren't very nice either. Grumpily-married London couple Peter (Reece Shearsmith) and Debbie (Amanda Abbington) meet brash Denver widow Elsa (Frances Barber) on a cruise, and after a lot of emails invite her to stay for a few days. It's only on the day she arrives that they decide to do a quick Google search on her name, and discover she's suspected of being a serial poisoner who's killed at least six people - but had never left quite enough evidence behind for a case to stick.

Theatre review: The Son

The Son is being advertised as the final installment in a trilogy of Florian Zeller plays that began with The Father and continued with The Mother; apart from the obvious connection in the titles there isn't, to me, a link that The Height of the Storm couldn't lay equal claim to. If not more so, because while all four are about families dealing with one person's deteriorating mental health The Height of the Storm, like the first two in the series, features a narrative that dips in and out of that fractured mind, putting the audience on the back foot. If The Son's narrative is also meant to be unreliable that's not apparent, though, as we appear to be seeing what the other characters can when 17-year-old Nicolas (Laurie Kynaston) reacts to his parents' divorce with a violent depression. His mother Anne (Amanda Abbington) discovers that he hasn't turned up at school for three months, and turns to her ex-husband for help.

Almost-a-review: God Bless the Child

Not quite a review because I didn't see all of Molly Davies' God Bless the Child. Not because I didn't want to, but because 10 minutes from the end the performance had to be cancelled due to one of the cast getting ill. As it's pretty much sold out tonight's audience had to be refunded rather than reschedule to another date, so this is the best I can do as far as reviewing Vicky Featherstone's production goes.

The first time I ever went to the Royal Court Upstairs, it had been turned into a pretty realistic B&B room in Scarborough, and this is the most uncanny transformation I've seen there since: Chloe Lamford has turned the attic space into the primary school classroom of Class 4N, who have been chosen to trial a new government teaching initiative.