Theatre review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Back to @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's learnt almost half the moves to the "Tragedy" dance, and a new revival of one of the definitive 20th century American classics. In Edward Albee's pitch-black 1962 tragicomedy Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Question Mark Gillian Anderson plays Martha, the daughter of the elderly president of a university. Her husband George (Billy Crudup) is a lecturer in the History department, briefly its head but only when all his other colleagues went off to World War II. Other than that it's been a pretty mediocre career, despite his marriage which was, at least partly, originally a strategic one to help him advance. The fact that it hasn't is just one of the disappointments that has made the relationship a sharp, bitter one, but strangely resilient.

Theatre review: High Noon

Billy Crudup has returned to the West End, which could be seen as a brave move but at least he's learned his lesson and is doing his own accent this time. And it's the most American of genres, the Western, as Eric Roth adapts the 1952 movie High Noon: Crudup plays Will Kane, the beloved sheriff of a small New Mexico town, who wants to get his oats and so has married a Quaker. Amy's (Denise Gough) beliefs mean she wouldn't agree to marry him unless he gave up his violent job, and the show opens with a double ceremony on a Sunday morning as the couple get married, followed by Will handing in his badge and gun. But no sooner has he done so than news arrives of unnamed politicians pardoning Frank Miller (understudy Noel White,) the outlaw and right-wing comic book writer who terrorised the town until Will brought him to justice five years earlier.

Theatre review: Harry Clarke

Here's me trying to stop filling my theatre reviews with Traitors references even I won't understand in a few years' time, and then someone puts a show on about a convincing liar called Harry Clark(e).

Transferring from New York, David Cale's Harry Clarke is an elusive - but not in an interesting enough way - monologue in which Billy Crudup plays 19 characters. Although for the most part he concentrates on two: Stewie from Family Guy and Spike from Buffy (in the last two seasons after Tony Head left, and James Marsters didn't even have anyone to remind him what he was aiming for.) Growing up in Indiana, at the age of eight Philip Brugglestein started speaking in a parody of a posh English accent, and despite the bullying - mainly from his father - that became his actual voice into adulthood. Moving to New York after his parents' death but not really knowing what to do once there, he spends an afternoon stalking a handsome man. When by chance he actually meets the man some months later, he panics and slips into another alternate persona, of Harry Clarke, who speaks like Damon Albarn having a stroke.