Theatre review: Welcome Home, Captain Fox!

The Donmar's latest season opens in high spirits with Anthony Weigh's new version of Jean Anouilh's Le Voyageur Sans Bagage, relocated to New York State in 1959 as Welcome Home, Captain Fox! Among her various charitable projects, aspiring socialite Marcee DuPont-DuFort (Katherine Kingsley) discovers Gene (Rory Keenan,) a WWII veteran in a military mental hospital, who doesn't remember anything before he woke up in in a French battlefield 15 years earlier. The wealthy Hamptons matriarch Mrs Fox (Sian Thomas) had a son who went MIA around that time, and Marcee is convinced she's found a match - and one that could get her a few rungs up the social ladder. Mrs Fox and her eldest son George (Barnaby Kay) are skeptical at first, but as soon as they see Gene they're convinced he's the missing Jack. But being in what he's told is his childhood home doesn't prompt any memories to come back, and he's not sure if he wants them to.

Theatre review: The Silence of the Sea

For the final Donmar Trafalgar production, Simon Evans directs Vercors' The Silence of the Sea, set in a recently-occupied French fishing village. An Older Man (Finbar Lynch) has kept himself pretty much to himself for most of his life, but he's recently been joined in his hilltop home by a Young Woman (Simona Bitmaté,) his niece. When the Germans arrive a young officer, Werner (Leo Bill) is stationed to live in their upstairs room. Right from the start Werner is talkative, giving enthusiastic speeches to the pair about his philosophical beliefs and his excitement to finally be in a country he always dreamed of visiting, insensible to the fact that these are people whose nation he's invaded. In his monologues to them he almost seems not to notice how they're responding to his unwanted presence in their home: For the entire duration of his stay, the Man and Woman don't speak a single word to him.