Theatre review: A Ghost in Your Ear

While Paranormal Activity extends in the West End, Hampstead Theatre has its own go at the ghost story with the return of writer/director Jamie Armitage to the Downstairs space, and two ghost stories in one: A man visits the remote house where his estranged father lived and died, to clear out his belongings. He discovers a strange mix of the spartan and the luxurious, with the dead man having apparently lived in dingy quarters, avoiding the grand hallways and well-appointed library - the only room in the house whose contents seem worth anything, but also the one the will demands should be destroyed entirely. While going through the books the narrator starts to find old photos and evidence suggesting his father led a more complicated life than he realised - and as night draws in and he looks into the house's dusty old mirrors, it seems those complications are going to haunt him too, in a very literal sense.

Theatre review: KENREX

My online Show of the Year 2021 and even better live in 2022, nobody could accuse Cruise of lacking in ambition, but that's how its creator Jack Holden's follow-up makes it feel. Less obviously personal but with much more of an epic scope, KENREX takes Holden's monologue-with-songs format and applies it to a true crime documentary, one of those violent stories of isolated and twisted Americana. The isolated place in question is Skidmore, a Missouri town so small and remote it doesn't have a sheriff - if anyone makes a 911 call it'll take an hour for the police to turn up. This is something that local bully Ken Rex McElroy has taken advantage of throughout the 1970s, and his reign of terror has included violence, physical and sexual assault, arson, killing pets, theft of livestock, and general menace and intimidation of the town's population.

Theatre review: The Real Ones

The creative team behind The P Word return to the Bush for what feels like another autobiographical story from Waleed Akhtar - especially given that both leads are aspiring playwrights - about life as a gay British-Pakistani man. This time the scope feels wider though, as it takes us through the sometimes melancholy story of a close friendship over almost twenty years. Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) were friends at school, but only become especially close at the age of 19, when we first meet them: Zaid has moved away to study, and as her parents have only allowed her to go to a local university so she can stay at home, visiting him (while pretending to be on a getaway for young Muslim girls) is one of the only ways Neelam can expand her horizons. Their parents' expectations are something that follow them for much of the story - Akhtar's play is called The Real Ones, and at times it feels as if it's only with each other that they show their real selves.

Theatre review: Octopolis

Seafood enthusiast Marek Horn follows up a play about tuna with a play about an octopus, and the people whose fascination with the molluscs becomes indistinguishable from love. In Octopolis George (Jemma Redgrave) is a scientist grieving her husband and research partner, with whom she developed theories about whether the notoriously solitary cephalopods might have a previously unknown social side. Since her husband's death, she's retreated into her living room with Frances, the octopus in a tank they were studying, and had made some potentially extraordinary discoveries on; she's not entirely unaware that she treats Frances as a way of still feeling connected to him. The house George lives in belongs to a University, and she's been too preoccupied to wonder why they've let her stay there since she stopped her teaching and research.

Theatre review: The Walworth Farce

After many delays Southwark Playhouse finally opens its new, permanent main house, a few minutes' walk away from its other venue on the other side of Elephant and Castle. Southwark Playhouse Elephant has staged a couple of community shows as a warm-up, but its first professional production is an overt reference to its new location: Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce takes place around the corner, in a 15th-floor council flat some years before the recent redevelopments that include the current building. Dinny (Dan Skinner) lives there with his two adult sons, and as the play begins Sean (Emmet Byrne) returns from his daily trip to Tesco, just in time for them to begin a performance: They will act out the day Dinny had to leave Ireland, fleeing to the flat that used to be his brother's before the events of that day.

Theatre review: Blackout Songs

Joe White's Blackout Songs is an alcoholic love story, which Guy Jones' production plays as a kind of twisted rom-com: Anisha Fields' traverse set design is bordered by rows of chairs that call to mind AA (Alcoholics Anonymous, not the Automobile Association.) That's because an AA meeting is where the protagonists meet, but it soon becomes apparent they're not ready to commit to sobriety: Rebecca Humphries' Alice and Alex Austin's Charlie (the characters are listed as just "Her" and "Him" in the programme) both claim this is their first-ever AA meeting, and they don't even stay past the coffee: When she finds out he's going cold turkey, Alice tells Charlie that has a one-in-twenty fatality rate, and they should go out and get him one last drink to save his life.

Theatre review: Yellowfin

In the middle of what seems to be a constant stream of doom-laden theatre (I thought light comedy was meant to flourish when the actual outside world was relentlessly depressing?) at least Marek Horn's environmental satire Yellowfin gives its dire warnings with a distinct side of quirkiness. Set in Washington DC some decades in the future, and specifically 35 years after all the oceans' fish mysteriously disappeared overnight, three US Senators have gathered to question Mr Calantini (Joshua James,) a manufacturer of artificial fish meat, who's already spent some time in prison for dealing in cans of the real thing on the black market. Led by the seemingly unflappable Marianne (Nancy Crane,) the panel also consists of the cold-bloodedly ambitious Stephen (Beruce Khan,) and the affable Roy (Nicholas Day,) who's prone to letting proceedings go off-course when he reminisces about his youth when you could eat real fish.