Theatre review: Double Feature

John Logan has written two major West End plays (plus wrangled the general madness of Moulin Rouge,) so a third is to be approached with a mix of excitement and trepidation, as I loved one of his previous plays and hated the other. Fortunately while his latest premiere isn't the instant classic that Red was, it also never threatens anything like the tedium of Peter and Alice. Logan is best-known as a screenwriter, and it's in the movies where he's found his inspiration for Double Feature. Particularly in the spiky relationships between actors and directors, as he gives us two pairings behind the scenes of famous movies: Anthony Ward's set is a dimly-lit Suffolk cottage, an authentically old building in the countryside that a studio has given young director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski) to stay in while he shoots the grisly 1967 horror movie Witchfinder General.

Theatre review: Blithe Spirit

The latest West End outing for Blithe Spirit is a show I was perhaps looking forward to more when it became one of my first casualties of lockdown, than I was by the time Richard Eyre's Bath production finally made it back to London. In large part this is probably because in the interim I listened to an audio version that ended up being my favourite out of any version I'd actually seen on stage, and likely hard to beat. Now at the Pinter Theatre, a decent-sized but far from packed audience suggests that despite being perhaps the best-loved Noël Coward play, there's still maybe not the appetite for quite how frequently it ectoplasmically manifests itself. Still, it's always someone's first time, and Vanessa was unfamiliar with the play about Charles Condomine (Geoffrey Streatfeild,) a writer who tries to research fraudulent psychics for his new book, by inviting a local eccentric to hold a séance.

Theatre review: The Height of the Storm

After premiering in Bath and Richmond, The Height of the Storm is the latest Florian Zeller play to make it to the West End, with director Jonathan Kent taking a risk on putting two notoriously difficult actors on stage together. The vague description in the publicity suggests another rather dark, sad journey into confusion and failing mental health, and while I’m generally a fan of cheerier things, where this writer is concerned I’d rather see him return to intimate tragedies than the so-so farces of his lighter side. Anne (Amanda Drew) and Elise (Anna Madeley) have gone to their parents’ home in the French countryside for the weekend; it soon becomes apparent that one of their parents has recently died, but Zeller deals in confusion and it’s hard to figure out which one, as both André (Jonathan Pryce) and Madeleine (Eileen Atkins) appear on stage regularly.

Theatre review: Exit the King

"He thinks he's the first person ever to die."
"Everyone is the first person ever to die."

That’s the exchange at the heart of Exit the King, and the real gut-punch in what is, somehow, the first time the National Theatre has ever staged a play by Eugène Ionesco. King Bérenger (Rhys Ifans) can command the sun to rise and set, win global wars with the force of his will alone, kill anyone who displeases him simply by ordering that their head fall off, and though technically mortal will only die when he chooses. Except suddenly none of this works. Bérenger deciding his own time of death was dependant on him choosing something within an average human lifespan, and at 483 years old the choice has been taken out of his hands. After a three-day illness his nation has shrunk, the army is down to one Guard (Derek Griffiths) who can’t even hear, let alone obey the king’s orders any more, a huge crack has appeared in the palace wall and Mercury has collided with Saturn – but only in the skies above Bérenger’s kingdom. Outside its borders, everything goes on as usual.

Theatre review: Imperium Part I: Conspirator

Following the transatlantic success of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, it's not a big surprise if the RSC wants to replicate it by giving Mike Poulton another sequence of historical novels to adapt into a two-part epic play. And as 2017 has been the company's year for exploring Shakespeare's Roman plays, Rome is where Poulton now takes us, for Robert Harris' Cicero Trilogy. Imperium begins with Conspirator, an accusation that could be leveled at a number of its characters, including the man with the biggest claim to defeating them: Cicero (Richard McCabe) is still remembered as one of the great orators, but his political career will require him to adopt means of manipulation beyond what he can persuade a crowd of. Tiro (Joseph Kloska,) the slave who serves as his private secretary, is the affable narrator of an eventful year in Cicero's life, and its aftermath.

Theatre review: Sweet Bird of Youth

I had a feeling that Daniel Evans taking over as Artistic Director of Chichester's theatres would make me break my previous rule of not making the trip to West Sussex; and with Ian McKellen revisiting King Lear there later this year it proved a bit too tempting. So in for a penny, in for a pound, I ended up booking three shows in the two theatres, and why not when there's the chance to see Brian J. Smith in another Tennesse Williams play only months after his memorable performance in The Glass Menagerie? This time he's Chance Wayne, the wannabe actor, more realistically a hustler, in Sweet Bird of Youth. A couple of weeks before we first meet him, Chance hooked up with a woman calling herself the Princess Kosmonopolis, who 's paying for a luxury lifestyle in return for his discreet companionship.

Theatre review: The Red Lion

When the two-and-a-half-hour Rules for Living got an 8pm start time in the Dorfman, word was this was an accident, caused by underestimating the run time. Well either that was a lie and shows are going to stick to the later time slot there regardless of how late that makes the finish, or the National have got really bad at judging running times because The Red Lion has an 8pm start time for a show of similar length. This is the centrepiece of Operation Get As Much As Possible Out of Patrick Marber Before His Writer's Block Returns, his first new play in 9 years. It's partly inspired by Marber's experience helping a failing football club avoid closure, and suggests he finds as much to dislike in football people as he does in humanity in general. The red lion is the logo of an unnamed non-league club not all of whose players get paid, leaving them open to the risk that as soon as they find a decent player, a professional club can easily swoop in to poach him with a better offer.

Theatre review: Gypsy

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This Chichester transfer hasn't opened to London critics yet.

Something of an origin story for Gypsy Rose Lee, the world's most famous striptease artist, Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's Gypsy is one of those perennial Broadway classics that doesn't get revived quite as often in the West End. Lara Pulver plays Louise Hovick, who would grow up to become the infamous title character, but the undoubted focus of the show is the pushiest of all pushy stage mothers, Momma Rose (Future Dame Imelda Staunton.) Rose tours around the US with a vaudeville show led by youngest daughter June (Gemma Sutton,) trading on a cutesy child act well into her teens. With the movies making vaudeville a thing of the past, June becomes disillusioned as the audiences dry up and elopes with one of her backing singers, Tulsa (Dan Burton.) The show can't possibly go on - unless you're Momma Rose and unwilling to admit defeat.

Theatre review: King Lear (National Theatre)

The first King Lear I ever saw, 20 years ago, starred Robert Stephens in the title role, and Edgar was played by the then rising star of the RSC, Simon Russell Beale. It maybe says a bit too much about my age that the wheel, which is so often referenced in the play, has come full circle and it's now SRB's turn - admittedly at the comparatively young age of 53 - to play the king who abdicates in all but name. He reunites with his long-time collaborator Sam Mendes on the National's main stage, and although it's a long-awaited event I couldn't help but feel a little bit apprehensive given I didn't love any of Mendes' Bridge Project productions. King Lear, though, sees the director get his Shakespearean mojo back for a truly epic - there's no major text cuts so we're in it for the full three-and-a-half hours - and emotionally devastating production.

Theatre review: Liolà

Pirandello's Sicilian tragicomedy Liolà is a bit of an oddity, especially coming from the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author: A music-soaked whirl through a small community, it comes in Richard Eyre's production with an all-Irish cast, perhaps to reflect the fact that the original is written in a local dialect. We may also be meant to infer a Catholic link, although the characters' Catholicism is here largely present so we can see them cheerfully ignore it. Simone Palumbo (James Hayes) is the wealthy landowner in a small village where pretty much everyone seems to be related. With nobody to leave his inheritance to he chose a much younger wife, but five years on Simone is 65 and Mita (Lisa Dwyer Hogg) still isn't pregnant. Enter Tuzza (Jessica Regan,) who's been knocked up by the local lothario, Liolà. She's willing to pretend the child is Simone's so it can inherit his money, and the old man's so desperate for an heir he might even start telling himself it's true.

Theatre review: Josephine and I

The first of two consecutive playwrighting debuts from popular stage actors at the Bush, Josephine and I also sees Cush Jumbo take to the stage in her one-woman show that's actually about two women: The "I" in the title is a fictionalised version of herself, a young black actress in the present day who's just auditioned (having been recalled seven times now) for an American cop show that could make her a star; and she's often distracted by thoughts of this job opportunity and how it impacts on her personal life, from the story she's actually trying to tell: That of another black performer, except in those days the word would have been "coloured" as we're going back to the mid-20th century to meet a woman who found ways to overcome the limitations put on her race, the vaudeville legend Josephine Baker.

Theatre review: Private Lives

It's really not that long since Noël Coward's Private Lives was last in the West End - just three years in fact since Kim Cattrall headlined a production. So Chichester Festival Theatre must have felt pretty confident in Jonathan Kent's production to risk a new transfer - indeed had it not been for the £10 Time Out ticket offer, which got us perfectly good seats in the back of the Stalls, I'm not sure I would have bothered with this. But it's worth the tenner and a couple of hours of my time as it turns out to be quite a different beast to the last time I saw the play. Elyot (Toby Stephens) and Amanda (Anna Chancellor) were married for two years, divorced for five, and have both now married new partners. On the same day, in fact, as their honeymoons bring them to adjoining balconies of a French hotel, where moments after reassuring their new spouses that their exes are ancient history, their accidental meeting reignites the spark. (Literally - it's Noël Coward so there's a lot of languid smoking.)

Theatre review: The Captain of Köpenick

I'm not sure what's going on at the National lately - the better the quality of work at the now-defunct Cottesloe, the more questionable the choices in the two bigger houses seem to get. After last year's unmemorable Travelling Light in the Lyttelton, Antony Sher moves to the Olivier for Carl Zuckmayer's farcical satire on bureaucracy and the blind following of orders, The Captain of Köpenick.

Wilhelm Voigt (Sher) is a lifelong small-time crook. Released from prison for the umpteenth time, he finds life on the outside even more of a challenge as he can't do anything without presenting his official papers - documents he's never actually had. As Voigt's very existence is questioned by the authorities, the Mayor of Köpenick (Anthony O'Donnell) is having a new military uniform made - a plot that will (eventually) cross paths with Voigt's.

Theatre review: Carousel

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and say Rodgers & Hammerstein weren't feminists. After a rather unfortunate experience with South Pacific I'm not sure what took me back to the Barbican a year later for more of their back catalogue, this time Carousel in a production by Opera North. This is one of Rodgers & Hammerstein's more regularly revived musicals, and the production has had some glowing reviews, but it won't be getting one from me. Julie Jordan (Gillene Herbert or Katherine Manley - multiple performers are listed on the website and the Barbican had no notice board up to say who was performing tonight) is a female lead (I'd tell you more about her character if she had one) who falls for Billy Bigelow (Eric Greene or Michael Todd Simpson.) He's just been fired from his job at a carnival carousel but they get married regardless, and within weeks he's smacking her about - in what I'm sure is meant as some kind of running joke, Billy keeps complaining that people have got him wrong: "I didn't beat her, I hit her."

Re-review: Posh

I saw Laura Wade's Posh when it was first performed at the Royal Court in 2010, and despite not being entirely sold on it at the time, booked again for its belated West End transfer: Two years ago the story of an Oxford "dining" club for the incredibly rich and privileged was seen in the context of the election, and the people who were likely to soon be running the country; I was interested to see how the play bears up in the hindsight of two years with those people in charge. Despite the long gap in transferring, six of the original 10 members of the Riot Club have come along to the Duke of York's (including Joshua McGuire, interestingly opting to reprise this instead of his Globe Hamlet from last year; maybe a summer in the West End was more appealing than another regional tour.) They're joined by Max Bennett as Harry, Pip Carter as Hugo, Edward Killingback (Yeah!) Them Motherfuckers Don't Know How To Act (Yeah!) as Miles and Harry Lister Smith as Ed. The club have had to take a few terms off after Toby (Jolyon Coy) got careless and their exploits made the papers. Now they're determined to pick up where they left off with their once-a-term tradition: A private dinner in a village gastro-pub, topped off by trashing the place, and throwing cash at the landlord to keep quiet about it.

Theatre review: The King's Speech

David Seidler tried to hawk his play The King's Speech to theatre producers but attracted the attention of a film producer instead. People more up-to-date than I on news of magic lantern shows, inform me the ensuing film did "quite well," so now the original play finally gets its chance on stage; and a West End stage at that, with a strong cast. King George V (Joss "DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY" Ackland) is nearing the end of his life, and not too thrilled about the succession. David, the future Edward VIII (Daniel Betts) is a bit of a raving Nazi and, much more importantly by the ruling classes' standards, shagging an American. Everyone except David himself seems to see the abdication crisis coming, but the trouble is the next in line is Bertie (Charles Edwards,) whose severe stammer doesn't make him the ideal person to make reassuring speeches to the nation as WWII approaches.

Theatre review: Sweeney Todd

Sometimes you can feel a lot better about yourself by spending some time with the very worst specimens of humanity. But enough about Vanessa, who's a big Stephen Sondheim fan and so got first dibs on my spare ticket for Sweeney Todd, now at the Adelphi in Jonathan Kent's production, originally seen in Chichester. Anthony Ward's multi-level set of metal staircases and curving walkways is an industrial Dante's Inferno in which *Michael Ball* can take centre stage as the vengeful barber, Benjamin Barker, who was transported to Australia because the corrupt Judge Turpin (John Bowe) wanted a shot at his wife. Changing his name to Sweeney Todd, Barker returns to his old Fleet Street premises above a pie shop, and plots bloody revenge on Turpin and his accomplice Beadle Bamford (Peter Polycarpou.) Meanwhile he tries to get back the daughter the judge raised, and is now trying to force into marriage.