Theatre review: Boys from the Blackstuff

Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff has become the stuff of legend, so even though I've never seen it - even if I'd been living in the UK at the time, I'd have been seven when the original TV series aired in 1982 - there's many iconic images and catchphrases from the show I'm familiar with. An early and influential critique of Thatcher's Britain, I won't go into the reasons a story about the unemployed being both left without a safety net and blamed for their predicament seems ripe to revisit today - we'd be here all night. I guess if you want to tell a story about men who just want to work there's some logic to getting an officially diagnosed workaholic to do it, so James Graham is on adaptation duties for Kate Wasserberg's production, which debuted at Liverpool's Royal Court before this brief run at the National, with a West End run coming next due to high demand.

Theatre review: Wolf Cub

Ché Walker wrote Wolf Cub in Atlanta, in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election in 2016. While people around the world wondered how it could have happened, for Walker it seemed obvious the seeds were sown decades earlier, by another Republican President who was a celebrity before he was a politician, who used polarising language to turn Americans against each other and demonise the poor and minorities. Crucially for this story, Ronald Reagan also survived an international scandal, in which in order to interfere with a foreign nation's election results, both arms sales to Iran and an influx of drugs into the US were fair game as fundraisers. Wolf Cub tells the story of the Reagan (and Bush) years through the experiences of Maxine (Clare Latham,) who when Reagan first comes to power is a nine-year old living with her father in the rural South. Her mother having apparently fled years earlier, she's left alone to deal with her father's physical and emotional abuse.

Theatre review: You Stupid Darkness!

Andy Rush and Andrew Finnigan in a play together at last, and it's not written by Tom Wells? It must be the End of Days. In Sam Steiner's strangely positive tragicomedy You Stupid Darkness! it actually is the End of Days, but rather than a single explosive event this is a slow-burning Apocalypse that's very gradually but inexorably rolling out across the world. The unnamed event has left the air toxic; next to parts of the city that are still liveable are no-go areas, the (presumably quarantined) residents horribly infected. Whole towns get suddenly wiped out and one day all the trees fell down, but it's not all over quite yet, and until it is everyone might as well just get on with their lives. So 17-year-old Joey (Finnigan) still has to get his work experience credit for school, and every Tuesday night goes to Brightline, a late-night helpline where he and three other volunteers take calls from people struggling to cope with Everything That’s Happening.

Theatre review: Jellyfish

I didn't catch Ben Weatherill's Jellyfish when it premiered last year but Tim Hoare's production has been given a higher-profile second life, transferring from the Bush's Studio to the National's Dorfman for a brief run. Written specifically for its lead actress Sarah Gordy, Jellyfish approaches a subject that feels uncomfortably taboo - a romantic relationship in which one person has a learning disability - with such casual sweetness it soon feels nothing of the sort. But there's no denying that it's a relationship with a unique series of challenges as 27-year-old Kelly (Gordy,) who has Down's Syndrome, flirts with 30-year-old Neil (Siôn Daniel Young,) who doesn't have a disability. Despite his own reservations Neil realises that his feelings for Kelly are real, and that she's also deadly serious about wanting a relationship with him.

Theatre review: The Funeral Director

I try to catch the Papatango playwrighting award winner every year, and this year's offering doesn't lack for ambition in its subject matter: Iman Qureshi's The Funeral Director takes on the line where different marginalised groups' human rights clash. Ayesha (Aryana Ramkhalawon) and her husband Zeyd (Maanuv Thiara) run a funeral home specialising in Muslim funerals in "a small divided town in the Midlands." Married for five years they seem to be ticking along with their lives well enough but clearly aren't actually happy - Zeyd is just about comfortable enough to confront the fact that his wife is completely uninterested in sex, but she always dodges the conversation. An unexpected crisis comes to their lives in the form of Tom (Tom Morley,) who comes into the funeral parlour in a state of shock after his Muslim boyfriend dies of an overdose that may or may not have been suicide.

Theatre review: Medea (Gate Theatre)

This is certainly the year not just for Greek Tragedy, but for plays that take some of the mythology's most famous stories and rewrite them in a new way. The Gate's Medea opens just as the Almeida's nears the end of its run, and while that interpretation - one I liked less the more I thought about it - sidelined the story's most notorious victims, to the point of not caring whether they were actually dead or not by the end, this one puts them centre stage. Writer Kate Mulvany and writer-director Anne-Louise Sarks tell the story from the bedroom shared by serious pre-teen Leon (Bili Keogh, alternating with Keir Edkins-O'Brien) and his hyper little brother Jasper (Samuel Menhinick, alternating with Bobby Smallridge.) They play, argue and discuss - tentatively - the conversation going on downstairs between their parents, which they are vaguely aware is about the future of their marriage. They're to stay in their room while their parents talk; the ominous first sound we hear is them being locked in by their mother.