Theatre review: Speech & Debate

An off-Broadway hit that's about to get a film adaptation, Stephen Karam's Speech & Debate is a gentle high school comedy, and a pleasingly mainstream look at LGBT teenagers' issues. Solomon (Tony Revolori) is an aspiring journalist whose ambition to get noticed means he always writes about subjects too controversial for the school paper to print. When the town is rocked by the scandal of the mayor having sex with much younger men, he decides to follow up on a rumour of one of his teachers doing the same thing. Howie (Douglas Booth) is an openly gay student who's only just transferred to the school, and been propositioned on Grindr by the drama teacher. He and Solomon find each other in the comments section of a podcast by Diwata (Patsy Ferran,) who's got a vendetta against the teacher for never casting her in school plays.

Theatre review: Experience

Dave Florez' short play Experience is about a subject I may or may not have heard of before - at one point in the play a Daily Mail story objects to it and the headline sounds familiar, but then the Daily Mail objects to pretty much everything except fascism so I could just be confusing it with something else. Sexual Surrogacy is a therapy technique originally designed to help individuals and couples with sexual problems, but it's been suggested as a way of helping rehabilitate criminals as well. Helen (Kirsty Besterman) is a therapist trying to get Dan (Christian Cooke,) who's been in a criminal psychiatric facility since he was 16, to talk to her, but he's institutionalised and unable to deal with other humans. She enlists her top sexual surrogate Amy (Charlotte Lucas) to start with something as basic as a handshake and move on to sex until he's ready to face the outside world.

Theatre review: Red Velvet

One of the biggest changes to come out of Artistic Director Musical Chairs is at the Tricycle, where Indhu Rubasingham takes over after nearly three decades of Nicolas Kent at the helm. Interestingly, considering Rubasingham was involved in the theatre's recent portmanteau political shows, she has said she's going to move away from the venue's focus on political theatre, as she doesn't want to compete with her predecessor's legacy. Instead she's looking to focus on a multicultural programme, influenced by the need to co-produce shows with other companies following the funding cuts that led to Kent's resignation. First up, Rubasingham herself directs the premiere production of Lolita Chakrabarti's Red Velvet, a project 14 years in the making, about the 19th century American Ira Aldridge, the first black actor to play the role of Othello in a London theatre.