Theatre review: Cockfosters

Taking its title from the station tourists mistakenly think has the smuttiest-sounding name on the Tube (only because they don't know how Londoners pronounce "Hainault,") Hamish Clayton and Tom Woffenden's Cockfosters is a short, affable and affectionate comedy about the London Underground. Technically the genre is romantic comedy, as it follows a journey on the entire Piccadilly Line route from Heathrow Airport to Cockfosters as Tori (Beth Lilly) returns from a relaxing holiday to Mexico and James (Sam Rees-Baylis) tops off a much more disastrous trip to Venice with the airline losing his luggage. But while the journey serves as an extended meet-cute it's really a framework for a series of comic sketches in which they encounter the various characters and situations that regular commuters will recognise - and generally dread.

Theatre review: Makeshifts and Realities

The Finborough's latest rediscovery season next takes us back around 110 years, for a triple bill of short, proto-feminist plays that take a steely, pragmatic look at young women of a certain comfortable, upper-middle class, and how their seemingly carefree lives are left up in the air when the money runs out - and they've not been allowed a Plan B. The first two come from writer Gertrude Robins, and run together so smoothly you'd be forgiven for thinking - as some of the audience did at the interval - that they were a single piece. They do tell a single story: In 1908's Makeshifts, sisters Caroline (Philippa Quinn) and Dolly (Poppy Allen-Quarmby) are caring for an invalid mother and have had to take in a lodger to help pay the rent. Both talk a big game of being independent: Teaching assistant Dolly says she doesn't think she'll ever get married, while Caroline is tentatively wondering if the suffragettes might have a point.