Theatre review: The Boys Are Kissing

Theatre503 always feels like a trek to get to and from, so I don't often include it in my regular venues, but Zak Zarafshan's The Boys Are Kissing seemed like a fun premise, and proved a good bet - taking that premise and running with it, even before it adds a camp supernatural twist on top. We're in the territory of middle-class couples navigating parenting dilemmas they never expected to face, and trying to do the best for their kids in the face of cutthroat playground politics, but with a very 2023 look at sexuality and gender: 9-year-old Lucas and Samir were seen by their classmates kissing in the playground, leading to a bit of gossip among the kids and a whole lot more among their mums. The headteacher has suggested their parents discuss the incident, so Lucas' parents Sarah (Amy McAllister) and Matt (Philip Correia) visit Samir's mothers Chloe (Eleanor Wyld) and Amira (Seyan Sarvan.)

Stage-to-screen review: Masks and Faces, or,Before and Behind the Curtain

The Finborough has held off on reopening for live performances until next month due to the added challenges faced by a venue of its size; but not having any intention of being forgotten until then, it's continuing with the online offerings. This time it's the unlikely pairing of Restoration Comedy with Zoom calls with, as part of the Kensington and Chelsea Festival, the rediscovery of Charles Reade and Tom Taylor's Masks and Faces, or, Before and Behind the Curtain. It's fair to say I approached this one cautiously: I've enjoyed Restoration Comedy before but usually it takes quite a lot of work from a production for me to like it. Most of the time we see people in the usual ridiculous outfits and wigs blandly exchanging lines that were very funny at the time but... not so much now. So in a format that just relies on the lines and the actors' faces, with no chance of physical interaction with each other, let alone the audience, I didn't expect much. So what a pleasant surprise for Matthew Iliffe's production to add Masks and Faces to the list of "where has this been hiding all these years?" Finborough rediscoveries.

Theatre review: Hecuba

While the Almeida's spent the summer giving us radical rewrites of Greek classics, the RSC has cut Euripides out of the picture altogether and, in what would probably have been a more accurate description of Icke's Oresteia and Cusk's Medea as well, commissioned Marina Carr to write an entirely new play based on the legend - in this case, that of Hecuba. There's a lot of dead children in this story too but Hecuba (Derbhle Crotty) isn't as okay with this as Medea: A mother of eighteen and the former queen of Troy, as the play begins the city has just been taken after ten years of war, and she's not yet quite understood the "former" part of her title. The Greeks have demanded that no male Trojans be left alive, and as most of her children were sons, she sits in her throne room surrounded by their dismembered bodies. Taking comfort from her two remaining children, she stands up to the triumphant Agamemnon (Ray Fearon.)

Theatre review: Platonov: Sons Without Fathers

The play usually titled Platonov is a bit of a Chekhov curiosity: A six-hour early play never performed in his lifetime, it was discovered locked away after the playwright's death and has been the subject of various attempts to rework it into something less unwieldy. Helena Kaut-Howson's version, titled Sons Without Fathers, focuses on the title character and the other younger figures in the story. Misha Platonov (Jack Laskey, The Bastard Love-Child of David Tennant And Daniel Radcliffe) is the 30-year-old schoolteacher in a remote Russian village. His youthful optimism gone, he's now the poster-boy for a disaffected generation - in Kaut-Howson's modernised production they find themselves a couple of decades after the fall of communism without a new ideal to replace it. Misha's search for a new meaning for his life leads, inevitably, to disaster.