Theatre review: Ilford Boy

Queer actors turning playwright seem to be having a moment, and after the mixed bag of his debut BLACK SUPERHERO Danny Lee Wynter follows it up with a major step up that suggests he's as much of a natural writer as Jack Holden and Jordan Luke Gage. The titular character of the semi-autobiographical Ilford Boy is 14-year-old Ted (Leo Whitfield Harris,) who lives in East London in the middle of a multicultural family. It's 1996 and he and his mum Tillie (Ria Zmitrowicz) have been staying at the old family home, looking after her mother during her last days. Streisand-loving Nan has just died as the play starts, so the whole family is around arranging the funeral: His aunts Jackie (Jodie McNee) and her monosyllabic husband Trevor (Cary Crankson,) and heavily pregnant Ann (Charlotte Jaconelli,) married to the much more opinionated Raj (Aaron Gill.)

Theatre review: The Boy in the Dress

With Cameron Mackintosh recently finding a loophole around having to give them a cut of the Les Misérables profits, it's not surprising if the RSC are on the lookout for another big musical earner to replace it, and join Matilda as a way of bankrolling some of their less commercial work. And it's definitely the latter show they have in mind with this new musical of David Walliams' popular children's novel The Boy in the Dress - just as Walliams' books themselves invite a Roald Dahl comparison by using Quentin Blake illustrations, so Robert Jones' colouring-book design for Gregory Doran's production instantly calls to mind the company's last big musical juggernaut. Mark Ravenhill (book,) Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers and Chris Heath's (music and lyrics) adaptation opens in a nameless English town, the setting for a family to explosively break up as a woman walks out on her husband and two young sons.