Theatre review: Stumped

Heading into what could be an odd season of programming at Hampstead, with no funding and no artistic director, it looks like transfers and co-productions could be the way forward for the troubled venue. Downstairs we get a show from Original Theatre, a company that seems to be predominantly creating streaming work, and a play by Shomit Dutta, a classicist who was captain of Harold Pinter's amateur cricket team. Stumped imagines an encounter between Pinter (Andrew Lancel) and another absurdist playwright with a love of cricket. In fact Samuel Beckett (Stephen Tompkinson) had briefly been a professional player in his youth, but at the time that he agreed to join Pinter's team he hadn't played for decades. The two playwrights wait for their turn to bat, Beckett twitchy and superstitious, Pinter injured but booming confidently in his affected dramatic voice.

Theatre review: Epstein – The Man Who Made The Beatles

After premiering in - of course - Liverpool, Andrew Sherlock's Epstein - The Man Who Made The Beatles comes to Leicester Square Theatre to tell the story of the band's first manager on the last night of his life. The opening statement that this isn't a play about the Beatles is given the lie by the title, but Sherlock suggests that's as much to do with Brian Epstein himself being unable to give up his affection for them, as it is with everyone he meets wanting to talk about his most famous clients. Used to being an outsider having grown up rich, Jewish and gay in Liverpool, when we meet Epstein (Andrew Lancel) in August 1967, he's made a habit of bringing rough trade back to his flat, the possibility of them robbing and beating him all part of the attraction. On this night he's picked up a pretty-boy Scouser known only as This Boy (Will Finlason) in a club.