Theatre review: Christmas Day

For the Almeida's last show of the year the audience enters the Stalls via the side door by the dressing rooms; as we don't then encounter a dead bull bleeding crude oil onto the stage, that's setting us up for disappointment right from the off. A dead fox does eventually get dumped on the dinner table of Sam Grabiner's Christmas Day though. The title describes the date when events take place but things are a bit more complex with regard to what exactly is being celebrated, as most of the characters are Jewish and have different opinions on whether or not it's OK to fill the room with the trappings of a Christian holiday. Brother and sister Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Transphobia Ltd Employee Bel Powley) live in an abandoned office building as tenant guardians, along with Noah's girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and various other young people.

Theatre review: The Strange Death of John Doe

Fiona Doyle’s second play for Hampstead Downstairs, The Strange Death of John Doe is structured as a post-mortem on what was, indeed, a strange death – though one not only based on a true story but on circumstances that are surprisingly common. The John Doe body in question will eventually be identified as Ximo (Benjamin Cawley,) found dead under the Heathrow flightpath with no sign of how he got there. The conclusion is that he’d stowed away in a plane’s landing gear and fell as it prepared to land, although whether the fall killed him or he was already dead from hypothermia is something pathologist Ger (Charlotte Bradley) and her team may never be able to establish. As they cut into Ximo’s body to find answers, detective John Kavura (Rhashan Stone) tries to figure out how he got there. Put on suspension because of his alcoholism and taken off the case, John is haunted too much by the story to let it go, and investigates anyway.