Theatre review: Blue Heart

Shopping and Fucking might be the most attention-grabbing title getting a 20th anniversary revival but, already long-established by the time Mark Ravenhill & co emerged, Caryl Churchill showed around the same time that she could more than match the new faces for experimentation in form - even if, like her more recent Escaped Alone, she does it with middle class ladies rather than sexually charged Gen X-ers. Blue Heart is in fact a double bill of short works that play around with, in the first instance form, and in the second case language. In Heart's Desire, Alice (Amelda Brown) and Brian (Andy de la Tour) are waiting for their daughter Susy (Mona Goodwin) to arrive from the airport; She emigrated to Australia and this is her first visit back. But the wait is infinitely prolonged because Churchill keeps taking the action back to the start, or to a particular point in the conversation.

Theatre review: Medea (Almeida Theatre)

Rupert Goold concludes his hit Greek season at the Almeida by directing by far the most frequently produced of the three tragedies (the end of this run will clash with the Gate's take on it,) Euripides' Medea. For me this production has a similar effect to Simon Russell Beale graduating from Edgar to King Lear last year: The first professional role I ever saw Kate Fleetwood in was as part of the chorus to Fiona Shaw's Medea, and now it's her turn at the titular role, in one of her comparatively rare collaborations with her husband. As with Robert Icke's take on the Oresteia, Rachel Cusk's adaptation of the story of the woman who takes brutal revenge when her husband leaves her is a pretty broad re-write of the original; and while Goold's production and his cast's performances are excellent, I'm a bit less sure about how well the story changes work.

Theatre review: The Cutting of the Cloth

After a couple of explosive shows to open the year, things get very low-key in Southwark Playhouse's Large space with the posthumous premiere of Michael Hastings' The Cutting of the Cloth. The setting is the basement workshop of a Savile Row tailor's in 1953, where Spijak (Andy de la Tour) and his daughter and "kipper" - a tailor's female assistant - Sydie (Alexis Caley) make a suit or two a week, lovingly hand-stitching all but a single seam. He prides himself on the quality of his work, but Eric (Paul Rider) and his kipper Iris (Abigail Thaw) machine-sew everything, making twice as many suits and taking home twice as big a paycheck. The two men have a family history, and they take out their personal frustrations with each other by having regular arguments over their very different ways of working.

Theatre review: People

Inevitably one of the biggest theatrical events of the year was always going to be the premiere of the new Alan Bennett play, the latest in his long-standing collaboration with the National Theatre's Artistic Director, Nicholas Hytner. People also reunites Bennett with Frances de la Tour, who had memorable supporting roles in both The History Boys and The Habit of Art, and here gets her turn centre stage. The setting is a crumbling country pile somewhere in South Yorkshire. The house and most of its contents are, in theory, priceless, but death duties have left little money to actually take care of the place, and it's now an unheated mausoleum, occupied by two batty old ladies: Dorothy (de la Tour,) the owner, who lives a virtual hermit's life and only keeps up with "current" events via a pile of newspapers from 1982; and her even battier friend Iris (Linda Bassett,) who sits in a world of her own knitting scarves for the troops (Dorothy's informed her there's a war on in the Falklands.)

Theatre review: Lay Down Your Cross

After the high-concept, high pace of his recent hit Constellations, another change of pace from playwright Nick Payne to something a lot more measured and naturalistic. In Lay Down Your Cross, Will Fricker's set takes us to the small flat where Tony (Andy de la Tour) lives on his own following his divorce - Emma Laxton's detailed sound design helps create a very realistic, lived-in environment. It's the night before his son Adam's funeral and Tony is waiting for daughter Dawn (Lucy Phelps) to arrive from Australia, where she's been living for the last couple of years. The play takes place over a little over 24 hours during which we also meet Tony's drunken ex-wife Grace (Susan Wooldridge) and Adam's girlfriend Raph (Angela Terence.) As the play goes on, Dawn discovers that her soldier brother didn't die in action like she originally thought.

Payne's examination of guilt, grief and attempts to apportion blame is sensitively and believably written and holds the attention without outstaying its welcome. Clare Lizzimore's production is suitably understated with four strong performances - Terence has a relatively small role but is hugely moving as she reads a note Adam left her and realises she's not to blame for his death. Lay Down Your Cross does what it sets out to do but after a while I couldn't help feeling it wasn't covering any new ground. The most interesting direction it takes is in looking at Tony's impossible choices with regards to his children's decisions - wanting to be supportive but not necessarily agreeing with what they do - and I wished we'd had more of this than simply the subjects of grief and the less "heroic" side of the military, which are the main themes. I think this struck me especially as the Hampstead Downstairs season is always promoted as a safe place for creatives to experiment. Lay Down Your Cross is quietly moving, well-written and performed, but experimental, original or daring it is not.

Lay Down Your Cross by Nick Payne is booking until the 24th of March at Hampstead Theatre's Michael Frayn Space.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.