Theatre review: Barcelona

Taking two Netflix stars closely associated with Madrid and Paris and throwing them together in a third European city, Bess Wohl's Barcelona is an entertaining story so full of red herrings that even trying to describe a genre for it feels like a spoiler. Its plot does hinge on quite a lot of elements that probably don't bear too much close inspection - I hear that hen dos have got a lot more expensive and elaborate since we took Alex to an Eighties disco night, but was a 12 hour+ flight each way for a hen weekend considered normal a decade later in 2009, when the play is set? Well that's what's brought Irene (Lily Collins) to Barcelona, where she's slipped away from her group to hook up with the man she'd been flirting with in a bar, Manuel (Álvaro Morte.) He's brought her back to a small apartment with a great view of Sagrada Família, a beautiful horizon like a jewel in the sun.

Theatre review: Camp Siegfried

The Old Vic's latest show is to a great degree being sold as the opportunity to see a pair of the most promising young British* actors on stage together before their careers go stellar, although for London theatre regulars Patsy Ferran and Luke Thallon have been star names for a while (Future Dame Patsy Ferran's even got the Olivier to back it up.) They play the nameless teenagers spending the summer at Camp Siegfried in Bess Wohl's play inspired by a real Long Island summer camp of the 1930s. Named after the Wagnerian hero and aimed at American families of German extraction, it targeted young people still being made fun of for Germany losing the First World War, and aimed to use that sense of victimhood to indoctrinate them into Nazi ideology. But as the play opens at the start of summer the camp's more sinister purpose is very far in the background, as Thallon''s cocky Him spots Ferran's awkward newcomer Her at a dance, and they try to flirt over the sound of an oompah band.