Theatre review: The Changeling

Ricky Dukes is a fun director, but he does seem incredibly keen on filling small stages with huge furniture, then letting his casts loose to try and manoeuvre their way around it: In last year's Doctor Faustus it was a maze of big wooden desks that everyone was banging their shins against; for this year's return to The Little with The Changeling they're trying to squeeze around a boardroom table, with Colette O'Rourke's Beatrice-Joanna at one point getting stuck when her hooped wedding dress swallowed an office chair. I haven’t seen Succession (it’s not on any of my streaming services, I’m not being a hipster about it,) but I assume that like a lot of recent shows that’s the visual reference that Sorcha Corcoran’s design is making.

Theatre review: Doctor Faustus

Perennially Christopher Marlowe's most popular play, Doctor Faustus gets another revival, this time from Lazarus, the small-scale classics company that returns to Southwark Playhouse after last year's gender-bending take on Salomé. Faustus (Jamie O’Neill) is an arrogant young academic who's decided he's exhausted all the knowledge available to him in books, and will cheat his way to learning the secrets of the universe: He employs a demon to be his servant, to answer any question he may have, and show him the wonders of the world. Mephistopheles' (David Angland) services, of course, come at the highest possible price: In return for 24 years of service, he gets Faustus to sell his soul to Lucifer (Candis Butler Jones.) Faustus manages to convince himself he doesn't believe in the afterlife anyway so it's a zero-risk gamble, until the deal is done and he has to face the consequences.