Theatre review: Games for Lovers

Ryan Craig wrote the English version of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class, which would probably have been my show of the year in 2009, except I didn’t start doing an annual theatre roundup until the year after. It’s not a connection you would easily make from seeing his latest, the light, slight relationship comedy/drama Games for Lovers. Logan’s (Calum Callaghan) relationship with Jenny (Tessie Orange-Turner) is quickly going tepid, and he tries to reinvigorate it by inviting her to move in with him. Logan’s continuing pursuit of something that’s not really working means his best friend Martha (Evanna Lynch) can’t make a move on a mutual attraction neither of them has wanted to be the first to admit to for years. She answers an ad for a flatshare with deluded wannabe lothario Darren (Billy Postlethwaite) who, in something of a coincidence pileup, is both an old acquaintance Logan has recently reconnected with, and someone who crashed and burned when he tried his pickup techniques on Martha only a couple of weeks earlier.

Theatre review: Twilight Song

Kevin Elyot’s final play is called, appropriately enough, Twilight Song, and it’s a short, distinctly odd one that left me with the suspicion he hadn’t quite finished working on it when he died. Alternating between the 1960s and the present day in the same suburban London villa, it was bought, largely thanks to a cash gift from a wealthy uncle, by Isabella (Bryony Hannah) and her meek new husband Basil (Paul Higgins.) Partly due to events that unfold in the play, the improvements they planned to make to it never happened and by the time their son Barry (also Higgins) is in his fifties, the place seems to be falling apart and he’s thinking of selling it. Estate agent Skinner (Adam Garcia) is optimistic that it can fetch a good price regardless, but he may just be buttering him up because he supplements his income with a side-line in prostitution, and he’s spotted a likely customer in the lonely and repressed Barry.

Theatre review: Raz

Playwright Jim Cartwright, best known for Jane Horrocks vehicle Little Voice, writes another piece designed to showcase one actor's range, in this case a male actor - specifically his son, James Cartwright. In the monologue Raz, Cartwright Jr plays Shane, de facto leader of his gang of mates, possibly because he's the one who knows where to get the drugs for their Friday nights out. Raz describes one such Friday night, starting with Shane shaking off the grey overalls of his Monday-Friday job as a forklift driver by spending his customary nine minutes on a tanning bed. Next it's getting dressed up while making sure he's already a bit drunk before leaving the house (cheaper than paying pub prices,) then meeting up with his mates and going to a series of pubs and clubs all over their unnamed town.

Theatre review: The Hotel Plays

Three Tennessee Williams vignettes come together to form an interesting promenade show from Defibrillator, a theatre company that's taken over three bedrooms and a function room of the Langham Hotel in central London to create The Hotel Plays. Small audience groups are led up and down stairs by an usher, and the stories linked by appearances from porter Charlie (Linden Walcott-Burton) as we witness intimate scenes from fracturing lives. The Langham is a pretty swanky hotel, but for Defibrillator's purposes its rooms represent places that probably aren't quite as posh, and more likely to witness the kind of nefarious business we see in the short plays. Like the long-running affair in The Pink Bedroom, directed by Anthony Banks, where a Man (Gyuri Sarossy) arrives expecting another no-strings night with his mistress. But the Woman (Helen George) is starting to want something a bit more from the relationship - something like respect.