Theatre review: In Praise of Love

1973's In Praise of Love is one of Terence Rattigan's last plays, a time when his star was in the descendant, and at times it does feel like we're going to be in for the work of a playwright whose best days are behind him. But like its characters, it's got hidden depths to take you by surprise. Sebastian Cruttwell (Dominic Rowan) is a literary critic for a Sunday paper, a vocal Marxist with undisguised contempt for anyone who doesn't share his belief in the theory, but not particularly keen on discussing how the USSR worked out in practice. After the end of WWII he met Estonian refugee Lydia (Claire Price) in Berlin's British quarter, and married her so she could come back to England, with the intention of divorcing once she got her citizenship. Decades on they're still married, and have a 20-year-old son, Joey (Joe Edgar,) who to his father's disgust campaigns for the Liberal Party.

Theatre review: The Earthworks

Like the black holes that form in the Large Hadron Collider, shows in the Young Vic's Clare space are small in scale, and are pretty much over as soon as they've opened. The latest of these is Tom Morton-Smith's The Earthworks which takes place on the night before the Collider's official opening in 2008 - not at CERN itself, but in a Geneva hotel where various interested parties are staying. Most are asleep because they've got work to do in the morning, but journalist Clare (Natalie Dew) is up late in the hotel bar: The online science correspondent for a broadsheet, her actual speciality is biology, and she's being kept awake by wanting to understand the physics enough to write a proper article about it, not just rehash a press release like usual.

Theatre review:Wickies: The Vanishing Men of Eilean Mòr

My eccentric reasons for booking shows can result in some disastrous choices as well as unearthing some hidden gems. The fact that I realised I could see both the gays from Two Doors Down on stage in consecutive shows led me to a couple of twists on traditional seasonal stories, and after something inspired in the very loosest possible sense by A Christmas Carol, it's Park Theatre's Scottish take on the traditional Christmas ghost story. But Paul Morrissey's Wickies: The Vanishing Men of Eilean Mòr takes its inspiration from a very real mystery: In 1900, three lighthouse keepers vanished without trace from the Flannan Isles, a particularly remote and dangerous part of the Outer Hebrides. Morrissey's play is only the latest in a long tradition of poems, stories and songs that have taken the mystery into the realms of folk legend.

Theatre review: Rice

Asian-Australian playwright Michele Lee names her new play Rice, after the staple food of China and India, to tell a story about two Australian women who are the product of immigration from those countries. Nisha (Zainab Hasan) is third-generation, her grandmother having moved from Bengal to Melbourne, and the family having thrived to the point that Nisha could become a high-ranking executive in Australia's largest rice-manufacturing company. Yvette (Sarah Lam) is a first-generation immigrant with an entrepreneurial spirit, who arrived from China a single mother. Her various schemes having all failed, she's now got a minimum-wage office cleaning job. Nisha is a workaholic whose every meal is a takeaway at her desk, and we first meet them when they're arguing over her leaving the containers everywhere: She says it's the cleaner's job to tidy up; Yvette says the bargain-basement cleaning contract her firm negotiated means a maximum of two minutes per office, so if it's not in the bin it's not getting thrown away.