Theatre review: Out of Water

In a South Shields school that's permanently getting "Requires Improvement" on its OFSTED reports, teacher Claire (Lucy Briggs-Owen) has been brought in to pilot an inclusion class scheme that's been successful elsewhere at turning round the fortunes of the most neglected students. It's not an obvious place for a pregnant, middle class lesbian to move to, and she's palpably nervous about how she'll be received there, but it's where her policewoman wife Kit (Zoe West) grew up, and she's convinced Claire it could be the place to start their family. Out of Water is the new play by Zoe Cooper, whose last play at the Orange Tree was Jess and Joe Forever, which means this an exciting prospect, but also has a lot to live up to. As in Cooper's earlier play this is a storytelling form of theatre, with Claire and Kit narrating fairly recent events, reliving their own part in them and taking on the other characters as needed.

Theatre review: Human Animals

Playwright Stef Smith takes the metaphorical language of dangerous animals and swarms of insects that accompany right-wing scaremongering about immigration, and imagines it as something literal in her apocalyptic Human Animals, but somewhere along the way the dark absurdity turns tiresome: Nancy (Stella Gonet) is waiting for her daughter Alex (Natalie Dew) to come back from a gap year, but her return coincides with a mysterious, localised plague among animals and birds that sees hundreds of pigeons at a time fly into windows, and dead foxes piling up in every garden. Nancy's friend John (Ian Gelder) is befriended by an odd man in the pub - Si (Sargon Yelda) turns out to be in charge of the efforts to deal with the crisis, which largely consist of quarantining the whole neighbourhood and incinerating first the diseased animals, then whole buildings, just in case.