Theatre review: Animal

David (Christopher John-Slater) has cerebral palsy; he's also gay and as sexually frustrated as any man in his mid-20s who's physically unable to have a wank would be. We meet him on the phone to a sex shop's complaints line, after the sex toy he hoped would solve all his problems turned out to be too difficult to use. His best friend Mani (Harry Singh) suggests he bite the bullet and try to have sex with some actual men: After resisting for a long time David joins Grindr. Jon Bradfield's Animal, based on a story by Josh Hepple, is a witty and full-on look at people with disabilities as sexual beings with the same needs as anyone else, but with a different set of obstacles to satisfying them. Different rather than necessarily greater, as the issues and hangups of the able-bodied men he meets are at least as much of an obstacle to his happiness as anything to do with his condition.

Theatre review: Almost Near

Artist Louise (Kate Miles) is planning a comeback exhibition, its centrepiece a sculpture of four British soldiers, dead from horrific injuries in Afghanistan. She insists, though, that the war is not the piece's real subject, merely a backdrop. I suspect this is a clue of sorts from playwright Pamela Carter about the thinking behind Almost Near, which features many scenes in Helmand Province, but may really be most concerned with a troubled family somewhere back in suburban England. As she plans to relaunch herself into the art world after a decade raising her son, Louise's relationship with husband Ed (Michael Sheldon) falls apart. Their scenes are interspersed with the real-life version of her sculpture: Four soldiers wake up after being bombed in Helmand. As they wonder how they could have survived their terrible injuries, they start to realise that they didn't.