Theatre review: Marriage Material

Split between the late 1960s and the present day in Wolverhampton, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Marriage Material, based on Sathnam Sanghera's 2013 novel, makes a connection between the politics of the two times that's hard to miss: In the first act, Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech is still fresh in everyone's memories, both the white racists who felt emboldened by it, and the immigrant communities who had to deal with the consequences. In the second act there's no single obvious instigator mentioned, but disenfranchised young white men are once again being encouraged to blame their problems on anyone with a different skin colour. These scenes are hard to miss, and they provide an important background to everything that happens to the central characters. What's impressive though is how this comes across without ever becoming what the story is really about.

Theatre review: An Octoroon

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an African-American playwright who got tired of everyone assuuming that his plays, regardless of their actual subject, must all be a metaphor for the black American experience. So, when looking for a subject to write about to cheer him up from a fit of depression he embraced this instead, adapting a play that confronted slavery head-on, and even has a title now considered offensive: 19th century Irish playwright Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon. This, at least, is the origin of the darkly comic new version of the play as described by an author-substitute in the prologue: BJJ (Ken Nwosu) tells us his An Octoroon got derailed when he couldn't find white actors to play the unrepentant racist slave-owners, and this is where things get creative as the races get well-and-truly muddled up in a show featuring blackface, whiteface and even redface*.

Theatre review: Hay Fever

It was only three years ago - and in his eponymous theatre - that Hay Fever was last on St Martin's Lane, but already Noël Coward's partner-swapping comedy of manners is back. This time it's down the road at the Duke of York's, in a production that comes to London from Bath with most of its original cast, plus Edward Killingback (Yeah!) Them Motherfuckers Don't Know How To Act (Yeah!) as Sandy. It's a June weekend at the country home of the desperately affected Bliss family: David (Simon Shepherd) is a successful novelist whose work keeps them all in luxury, but the alpha personality is his wife Judith (Felicity Kendal,) a retired actress considering returning to the stage because she hasn't had quite enough letters demanding it. Everyone claims to be looking forward to a quiet weekend as they've each invited someone to the house - four new admirers the Blisses can spend the weekend toying and flirting with.

Theatre review: The Kitchen Sink

Drama school showcases technically fall under the category of amateur performances, which isn't something I like to review. But given these are people who hope to be acting professionally after graduating, I'm going to take the view that they'd want to know how their efforts come across to the public.

So Tom Wells' ubiquity in 2014 continues, and even the drama schools are including him on the curriculum as LAMDA presents his 2011 play The Kitchen Sink as one of their public shows this year. The title is a statement of intent as Wells takes the bleak kitchen sink genre of people's fruitless struggles to hold on to work and find a path in life, and turns it into something distinctly his. The family living in Withernsea, a Yorkshire town slowly falling into the sea, is crumbling just as steadily but the impression given by the play is far from grim-up-North: The overriding impression is that there's always hope, in a typically funny collection of characters. The heart of the play is school dinnerlady Kath (Clio Davies,) sick of cooking chips at work every day so trying to inject a bit of variety into her meals at home (although I'm firmly on Martin's side where couscous is concerned.)