Theatre review: Deposit

March seems to be the month for plays about the frighteningly spiraling cost of property, with a number of playwrights imagining young couples signing up for bizarre, twisted conditions in return for a place to live. If Mike Bartlett's Game was a Big Brother nightmare though, Matt Hartley's Deposit feels grimly plausible. Ben (Ben Addis) and Rachel (Akiya Henry) know that paying inflated rent even on a tiny flat will mean they'll never raise the deposit for their own place. If they could find a way to halve the rent though, they could scrimp and save and have something to show for it at the end of a year. So they move into a one-bedroom studio with Rachel's old university roommate: They'll take the bedroom and Melanie (Laura Morgan) and boyfriend Sam (Jack Monaghan, so handsome our Earth instruments are unable to measure it,) will take the sofabed, and a makeshift screen will be their only hint of privacy.

Theatre review: Edward II

Some shows generate a Marmite buzz right from the first preview, and that was definitely the case with the National's new Edward II, right up to the official reviews, which ran the gamut from one star to five. Described as "rarely-performed," I've actually seen Marlowe's play twice before, albeit in zero-budget fringe productions, and I've found it to be the strongest of his plays that I've seen. So I didn't see playing it on the National's biggest stage as a particularly big risk, and surely whatever you think of this production the play itself comes out of it very well. Having been a "rising" stage name for ages, John Heffernan finally gets top billing as Edward, the newly-crowned king whose first act is to recall from exile his lover Gaveston. Hated by the court, and distracting the king from the small matter of war with Scotland, Gaveston's presence inspires the barons into all-out rebellion against Edward.

Theatre review: Larisa and the Merchants

The effervescent Larisa (Jennifer Kidd) is poor but popular with the men of her small port town on the Volga; her lack of a dowry is the only reason she's not yet married. Her relationship with the aristocratic Sergei (Sam Phillips) ended in heartbreak and, on the rebound, she's accepted the proposal of the smitten, penniless civil servant Karandyshev (Ben Addis.) When Sergei returns to town there's clearly still something between the two, but as Larisa is tempted to leave her fiancé for a man who's already betrayed her once, she doesn't know how close she is to its happening again: Having lost most of his money, Sergei has agreed to marry an heiress so he can restore his fortunes, and living in the style to which he's accustomed will always trump any feelings he might have for Larisa.