Theatre review: Bleak Expectations

We've had films and TV get stage adaptations, now radio gets in on the act; it ended on Radio 4 eleven years ago, but like its characters Mark Evans' Bleak Expectations has risen from the dead in a new and disturbing form. Evans has written a stage version that adapts mainly the first of the five series of frantic Dickensian parody about Pip Bin (Dom Hodson) and his sisters Pippa (Serena Manteghi) and Poppy (Rachel Summers.) Their rich, happy Victorian childhoods go wrong when their father dies in a freak penguin-related accident, and their mother (Ashh Blackwood) does the only respectable thing for a widowed woman of her time, and immediately goes mad. The siblings' nemesis is their new guardian, Gently Benevolent (John Hopkins,) who makes no secret of the fact that he's constantly plotting to murder Pip and marry one of his sisters for the inheritance.

Theatre review: So Here We Are

DRAMA SCHOOL DISCLAIMER: Drama school productions are classed as amateur performances, which is why I always make this disclaimer; that said, I’ll hopefully be seeing everyone involved in professional productions soon, so I avoid judging them differently.

Yes, catching the odd LAMDA production does open up the possibility that I’ll get bragging rights for spotting a star of the future, but it can also be a chance to see a play I missed the first time round – in this case because Luke Norris’ 2013 play So Here We Are premiered in Manchester. While Norris-as-playwright is yet to have had as big an impact as Norris-as-actor had on that girls’ school party when he took his shirt off in A View From The Bridge, I’m pretty confident he’s got it in him, as the first half in particular of this play about young men’s mental health demonstrates. Nate Gibson’s set is a concrete wall on the banks of the Thames, where four men in their twenties are hanging around after the funeral of their friend Frankie, drinking, smoking, and waiting for the dead man’s girlfriend Kirstie (Amy Vicary-Smith) to arrive with balloons for one last ceremony she has in mind.

Theatre review: The Wipers Times

Next year's centenary of the Armistice will probably see as many First World War plays as the centenary of its start did, but Ian Hislop and Nick Newman have got in early with their offering, and as befits editor and writer of Private Eye their angle is to look at a satirical publication. The Wipers Times takes its title from a weekly (if they could find the paper to print it that week) newspaper published from the trenches, which in turn was named after the English soldiers' mispronunciation of Ypres. That's where former printer Sergeant Tyler (Dan Tetsell) discovers a working printing press, which his Captain Fred Roberts (James Dutton) and Lieutenant Pearson (George Kemp) use to create a morale-boosting collection of spoof advertisements and takedowns of the official war correspondents, whose articles make it sound as if they're in the trenches, it's just that no soldier has ever actually seen them there.