Theatre review: Reunion

Transferring to the Kiln after a hit run at the Galway International Arts Festival, writer-director Mark O'Rowe's Reunion is a look at a family that appears close but don't actually all end up in the same place together all that often - and why that's probably a good thing. Elaine (Aislín McGuckin) hasn't had her whole family in the same room since her husband's funeral a couple of years earlier, but now her son and two daughters have come back to her home on a small, remote island off Ireland for a meal and a few drinks to remember him. In fact Janice (Venetia Bowe) and her husband Stuart (Stephen Hagan) weren't expected, but they've come as a surprise, and brought with them Elaine's sister Gina (Catherine Walker,) whose long-term partner has just dumped her in the middle of a midlife crisis.

Theatre review: Fanny and Alexander

The Old Vic's previous artistic regime was, famously, not really that interested in Fanny, but on Matthew Warchus' watch she's been put centre stage alongside her brother. Ivo van Hove's tedious double-bill had me uninterested in seeing another Ingmar Bergman adaptation, but casting Dame Penelope Wilton* was enough to make me change my mind about Stephen Beresford's Fanny and Alexander. It's easy to see why this one suggested itself for the stage, following as it does a theatrical family through the eyes of its youngest members, Alexander (Guillermo Bedward, Kit Connor, Jack Falk or Misha Handley) and his younger sister Fanny (Zaris Angel Hator, Amy Jayne, Molly Shenker or Katie Simons.) Wilton plays their grandmother Helena, matriarch of the Ekdahl family who run a theatre and restaurant in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.