Theatre review: Farm Hall

When looking at the ethics of science, there's no more fertile ground for writers to explore than the atomic bomb. In her impressive playwrighting debut, Katherine Moar explores the issue through six scientists who've already lost the nuclear arms race - they just don't know it yet. Based on a real event and secretly recorded conversations, Farm Hall takes place during the last days of the Second World War, after Hitler's fall and the revelation of the true horrors Germany had perpetrated. The six German men are under house arrest in an English country pile, filling their time playing chess, mending a broken piano, and staging a reading of Blithe Spirit, whose recent success in the middle of the Blitz baffles them. They are Hitler's surviving nuclear physicists who hadn't already defected by VE Day, and nobody seems sure what to do with them, or even if they'll be allowed to survive their comfortable prison.

Theatre review: The Wonderful World of Dissocia

Anthony Neilson is certainly a playwright of extremes - I've seen plays of his that have ranged from horror to panto, occasionally within the same scene. Sometimes this is a response to mental illness, like Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness, the surreal freak show he wrote as an antidote to a bout of depression. A play that deals even more directly with the theme is one I'd heard of but never had the chance to see before: The Wonderful World of Dissocia, which Emma Baggott revives at Stratford East. Lisa (Leah Harvey) has been feeling out of sorts for a while, and the reason is revealed when she tries to get her watch mended. Watch repairer Victor (Hollywood Body Double Leander Deeny) reveals that there's nothing wrong with the timepiece, it's Lisa who's an hour out of time: She was on a delayed plane when the clocks went back in October, and she never got back the hour she lost when they went forwards the previous March.