Theatre review: Acceptance

17-year-old Hong Kong Chinese violin prodigy Angela Chan (Jennifer Leong) has been studying music in America under a scholarship for the last year, and is now applying to an Ivy League university. She’s been invited to what she assumes is an admissions interview, only to find the Dean of Admissions, Birch Coffin (Teresa Banham,) waiting to interrogate her on her moral character. After spotting some gaps in her application Birch has discovered that Angela left her first Performing Arts High School after accusing a teacher of rape, an accusation that was never proven and has been hushed up; Birch is concerned the girl might be a fantasist and a potential liability. Angela turns to the college’s new Diversity Officer, Mercy (Debbie Korley,) hoping for a champion against an admissions officer she believes has made her mind up against her already.

Theatre review: Dry Powder

With another financial crash threatening, a play about the people who play Monopoly with people’s livelihoods would seem a well-timed production for Hampstead Theatre. So it’s a shame Sarah Burgess’ Dry Powder turns out to have very little to say about them, or much else for that matter. Rick (Aidan McArdle) runs his own private equity firm with his partners and trusted lieutenants Seth (Tom Riley) and Jenny (Hayley Atwell,) who offer contrasting ways of dealing: Jenny focuses on the numbers and is ruthless in pursuit of profit, while Seth has a more creative outlook and worries about the way the company’s public image affects their ability to do business. It’s this latter approach that Rick ignored when he acquired and liquidated a supermarket chain, laying off hundreds of staff on the same day that he threw himself an overblown engagement party.

Theatre review: Kiss Me

He's still considered something of a big-hitter after the success of One Man, Two Guvnors, but Richard Bean's more recent plays have tended towards the disappointing, so a step back to something a bit more low-key and intimate could be a good move. And so it proves as Kiss Me is a two-hander running just over an hour, and premieres at Hampstead's Downstairs studio space. A romantic comedy-drama with a period setting but some unexpectedly modern attitudes, it takes place a few years after the First World War, which has left women all over Britain widowed, or with husbands so badly injured they can't father children. Enter the unseen and mysterious Dr Trollope, who finds desperate women and offers them an extreme solution: With fertility treatment still in its infancy, she can arrange for a visit from a particularly potent young man to make a baby the old-fashioned way.

Theatre review: Labyrinth

Playwright Beth Steel seems to like titles reminiscent of kids' classics: Much as her Wonderland featured miners at the bottom of the tunnel rather than a white rabbit, her Labyrinth offers up bankers instead of David Bowie and muppets. In fact the reference that most often came to mind was Lucy Prebble's ENRON, as Labyrinth too aims to illustrate more recent financial collapse through the story of a historical one - in this case the late 1970s / early 1980s mountain of debt that crippled South America. Hampstead Theatre have brought back their recent discover Sean Delaney and put a whole show on his shoulders as John, son of a fraudster and determined to make a fortune in a more reputable way himself. He's taken on by a bank that specialises in making loans to foreign governments, and learns from Alpha male Charlie (Tom Weston-Jones) how the world is run on behind-the-scenes handshake deals.

Theatre review: The Argument

The title of William Boyd's The Argument does relate to one argument in particular - the one in the opening scene, which has repercussions for the rest of the play - but every scene sees a different pairing of characters lock horns. Pip (Oliver Dimsdale) and Meredith (Marianne Oldham) are disagreeing about a crappy movie they've just watched, when the topic suddenly gets darker, leading to Pip admitting that, after only three years of marriage, he's had an affair with a colleague. He moves out of the house, leading their friends to try and get them to reconcile, while Meredith's parents Chloe (Diana Hardcastle) and Frank (Michael Simkins) can't agree on whether they want their daughter to get back with her husband, or move on. A lot of alcohol seems to be fueling both the characters' aggression, and their bad decisions, a fact which Anna Ledwich's production highlights by leaving their empty wine glasses and beer bottles to litter the stage as the play goes on.

Theatre review: Deluge

Moi Tran's set for Fiona Doyle's Deluge has certainly taken the play's title literally: The traverse stage is flooded, with a raised central platform forming a kitchen area on which most of the action takes place. The front rows have been given towels because there's a lot of splashing about - I found that sitting on the left-hand audience bank from the entrance, and draping the towel over my legs and bag were enough to keep me dry, although when a chair gets chucked into the water it's every man for himself. All the water is because the play has an apocalyptic feel, with biblical levels of flooding - Ireland, where the story is set, has it pretty bad, but from what we hear America has it much worse. As more clouds gather overhead, farmer Kitty (Elaine Cassidy) is behind bars.

Theatre review: Four Minutes Twelve Seconds

What with the front-of-house remodelling that's been going on at Hampstead Theatre, the current Downstairs season was announced quite late in the day, allowing for some topicality. Of course, rape culture and victim-blaming have been prominent topics for some time now, but the recent hacking that's made celebrities' private nude photos and sex tapes public makes James Fritz's first full-length play even more of-the-moment. Four Minutes Twelve Seconds is the running time of a sex video made by 17-year-old Jack and his girlfriend Cara, and at the start of the play it's been leaked to all their school friends. As his father David (Jonathan McGuinness) tells it, Jack got the blame for releasing the video, and Cara dumped him for it. But David is holding back some of the details, such as why Cara's family have attacked Jack in the street: A more serious accusation's been made against him, and the tape may in fact prove whether it's true or not.

Theatre review: The Empty Quarter

Greg and Holly moved to Dubai as a result of a vague romantic attraction of Holly's to the desert. In fact when we first meet them, Holly (Jodie McNee) is recovering from wandering off out into it and getting lost. Greg (Gunnar Cauthery) hasn't taken to the place and, concerned about his wife's health as she continues to be fascinated by the desert that nearly killed her, quits his job in the hope that it'll shock her into returning to the UK with him. But he's reckoned without the draconian local laws against getting into debt. One missed mortgage payment later and he's in a Middle Eastern prison, and the only way out is a loan from the closest thing they have to friends out there, an older English couple. And a business deal with Gemma (Geraldine Alexander) and Patrick (David Hounslow) ends up looking more like a Faustian pact when the two couples become the only constant in each other's lives.

Theatre review: Donny's Brain

Donny (Ryan Early) is in hospital with brain damage following a car crash. Neurologist Al (Nikesh Patel) is studying him, helping him piece together the parts of his memory that he's lost, and he seems to be making some slow progress. But what would really help is if his partner Emma (Emily Joyce) and her daughter Flea (Skye Lourie) were to visit him, and he can't understand why they haven't. Actually he and Emma had a messy break-up two years ago, and Donny's memory has reset to three years ago when he still loved her - erasing in the process his memories of new wife Trish (Siobhan Hewlett.) Hampstead Theatre's Downstairs season returns with Donny's Brain, Rona Munro's bittersweet play about what might happen if someone really did get the opportunity to turn back the clock on a failed relationship. As the initially angry Emma, who hasn't seen Donny since the break-up, gets a glimpse of the man who was so much in love with her, she also starts to wonder if they could go back to how things were.