Theatre review: Home, I'm Darling

Laura Wade’s new play opens with a cheesy domestic scene straight out of a 1950s sitcom, as perfectly-coiffed housewife Judy (Future Dame Katherine Parkinson) floats around her kitchen making breakfast for her estate agent husband Johnny (Richard Harrington,) making sure he’s got everything ready so he’s not late for work. But before she can get on with the cleaning and tidying she needs to look up a couple of housekeeping tips on the internet, because Home, I’m Darling takes place in the present day. Having met through their shared love of all things ‘50s, the couple have decked out their house in authentic period designs and goods – even if that means a fridge that only works when it feels like it – decanting all their groceries into period-appropriate containers and, when Judy was made redundant three years ago, decided to take the experiment further by living their daily lives as if it was sixty years earlier, right down to the traditional gender roles.

Theatre review: Buried Child

A visit much later in the run of a play than I usually make - in my attempt to see less theatre Buried Child had been an easy one to skip, thanks to the hefty prices, horrible Trafalgar 1 seats, and the fact that I've not yet found much to like about Sam Shepard's plays about American masculinity. Scott Elliott's production did end up getting recommended to me by various people, though, and when a decent discount turned up for an otherwise quiet week I decided to give it a go after all. I don't know that it ended up ticking the "unmissable" box for me, but this surrealism-tinged 1978 play was certainly a bigger hit with me than the previous Shepard works I've seen. The setting is a crumbling house in remote Illinois, where Dodge (Ed Harris) has long since stopped sharing a bed with his wife and, elderly and sick, now barely ever leaves the couch.

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: Raving

Actor Simon Paisley Day turns playwright with a familiar comic setup: Three couples go on what is meant to be a relaxing weekend together, but end up in one catastrophe after another, their friendships, and sometimes their relationships, tested. Ross (Robert Webb) is a PR man whose orange wife Rosy (Sarah Hadland) takes him at his word that he's blameless on the various occasions she's caught him with a half-naked au pair. They've rented a Welsh cottage and invited their friends Briony (Tamzin Outhwaite) and Keith (Barnaby Kay) to spend the weekend with them, in the hope that it'll help Briony, a fretful mother, relax. But her chances of calming down aren't helped when she realises that the braying Serena (Issy van Randwyck) and Charles (Nicholas Rowe) have also been invited, and when the latter couple's sexually-forward teenage niece crashes the party as well, the results range from awkward revelations to slapstick violence in Raving.