Theatre review: Bartholomew Fair

The 1980s Canadian sprinter wasn’t the first Ben Jo(h)nson to very obviously be on drugs, as evidenced by the Jacobean playwright’s Bartholomew Fair. Jonson’s comedies tend to be madcap affairs with a lot of grotesque characters getting themselves tied up into convoluted plots and gulled by con-men. Bartholomew Fair’s slice-of-life look at the characters who populate the titular fair features all of this, but without even the suggestion of a coherent plot holding it all together – as Phill put it, if someone asked what happened in the play, you’d have to answer “everything.” But a couple of plotlines do just about start to make sense: Bartholomew Cokes (Zach Wyatt) is due to get married on the feast day of the saint who bears his name and, laden with cash, is spending the day at the celebratory market (in what is now Spitalfields,) keen to stock up on food and luxuries for the wedding day.

Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare's Globe)

Despite being a spin-off for one of Shakespeare’s best-loved characters, The Merry Wives of Windsor’s main claim to fame is a highly dubious story about Queen Elizabeth I wanting to see “Falstaff in love” (which if it were true would surely have seen Shakespeare at the very least spend some time in the stocks because love… ain’t really what Falstaff’s in here*.) Not that the play’s one of the harder comedies to get a laugh out of, but it’s rarely one of the big hitters either. Now Elle While’s production for Shakespeare’s Globe comes along to make a solid case for this proto-sex farce as, if far from the subtlest of comedies, one that can deliver reliable laughs all evening. It doesn’t hurt that While has brought back, from last year’s rep company, someone whose name in the casting announcement instantly makes a production a must-see: Pearce Quigley plays Sir John Falstaff, the viciously amoral but strangely likeable knight from the Henry IV plays.

Theatre review: Foxfinder

Last seen in London in 2011 when it was the Papatango award winner, Dawn King's Foxfinder is, on the face of it, a canny revival for 2018 when its paranoia and scapegoating can be repackaged as a Brexit play. But something's gone wrong in the execution of Rachel O'Riordan's production, and it’s left a play that can be genuinely creepy and atmospheric floundering. Samuel (Paul Nicholls) and Judith Covey (Heida Reed) own a farm somewhere in a dystopian England where food is scarce, so farmers like them are under immense pressure to live up to – seemingly quite unrealistic – crop quotas. Some months earlier, the couple’s four-year-old son drowned, and Samuel retreated into a long depression. Between this and bad weather they’re struggling to live up to their targets so the government has sent an investigator to determine if they’ve mismanaged the farm, or worse: If there’s a fox on their land.

Theatre review: Twilight Song

Kevin Elyot’s final play is called, appropriately enough, Twilight Song, and it’s a short, distinctly odd one that left me with the suspicion he hadn’t quite finished working on it when he died. Alternating between the 1960s and the present day in the same suburban London villa, it was bought, largely thanks to a cash gift from a wealthy uncle, by Isabella (Bryony Hannah) and her meek new husband Basil (Paul Higgins.) Partly due to events that unfold in the play, the improvements they planned to make to it never happened and by the time their son Barry (also Higgins) is in his fifties, the place seems to be falling apart and he’s thinking of selling it. Estate agent Skinner (Adam Garcia) is optimistic that it can fetch a good price regardless, but he may just be buttering him up because he supplements his income with a side-line in prostitution, and he’s spotted a likely customer in the lonely and repressed Barry.

Theatre review: Blurred Lines

Nick Payne and Carrie Cracknell's devised piece for The Shed was meant to be the final production at the National Theatre's temporary venue, but its shelf life has now been extended into the spring. It would have made an explosive finale though, a theatrical exploration of the themes from Kat Banyard's feminist book The Equality Illusion. On a vast staircase that fills The Shed's stage, eight women discuss, act out, and sometimes sing about the ways women continue to face inequality today, from the workplace to the law, and a culture of sexual violence that's officially condemned but often glamourised in practice. The insidious misogyny of the music business is a recurring theme so it's no surprise that, with pointed topicality, the piece has been titled Blurred Lines.