Radio review: The Effect

Remember those old BBC sound effect albums? I don't recall there being a "hand job" effect on them but I guess Auntie really does have something for every occasion.

Although I listen to a fair bit of half-hour radio comedy I don't often get round to any full-length drama, but Lucy Prebble's 2012 play The Effect was one of my top shows of that year, and one that I still remember vividly; add a top voice cast for Abigail le Fleming's Radio 3 production and I couldn't resist revisiting it. Lorna (Christine Entwisle) is the doctor in charge of the intensive medical trial of a new antidepressant; she's suffered from depression herself, and is skeptical about the use of drugs to treat it, so she's concerned about the reaction two of the test subjects are having: Connie (Pirate Jessie Buckley) and Tristan (Damien Molony) appear to have fallen very quickly in love with each other. If the development is worrying for the medical team, it's even more so for the pair themselves, their emotions - particularly Connie's - bouncing between elation at a new love, and the horror that one of the strongest things they've ever felt might just be a side-effect.

Theatre review: The Twits

With two Roald Dahl adaptations still doing good business in the West End, the Royal Court might look like it's piggybacking its way to a family hit, but The Twits isn't quite like Matilda, and certainly not like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Like those shows, it has a somewhat surprising choice of playwright for the adaptation - Enda Walsh this time - but unlike those it can't rely on the audience's familiarity with the plot: The Twits is closer to a short story than a novella, so Dahl's original story is used up in about 15 minutes at the start and end of the stage version. In between, Walsh and director John Tiffany are free to make up their own new version of the story - perhaps that's why it's being promoted as a "mischievous adaptation" - which to me at least felt very much in the spirit of Dahl. Mr and Mrs Twit (Jason Watkins and Monica Dolan) are a horrible couple who hate bathing, children, other people in general, and most of all each other.

Theatre review: Hope

The Royal Court's Christmas shows tend not to be like other theatres' Christmas shows, and while for the second year running the creative team is writer Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany, this year's offering makes vampires seem positively festive in comparison. Hope follows the year 2014 in the life of the Labour council of an unnamed, working class town (everyone in the cast keeps their own accent, so it could be pretty much anywhere.) The actual business of running the town doesn't get a look-in though, as the Government's austerity measures have seen their budget slashed by £22 million a year, and everyone's primary concern is to determine which essential services have to be cut. Thorne's play identifies Government policy as a cynically genius plan: Slash budgets from the top but leave the details, and all the resulting ill-feeling, to the local, opposition councils.

Theatre review: Narrative

If Anthony Neilson writes a play called Narrative, one thing you can be fairly confident about going in is that there won't be a traditional narrative on offer. Although the action does coalesce into a story as the play goes on and the characters form relationships, what Neilson and his actors are interested in is the way life itself can be experienced as a story, and consequently rewritten in hindsight. A mother (Christine Entwisle) channels her grief over her son's death into a petition to ban the drug that killed him; when new information shines a different light on events, how does it also change what her life has become? A young woman (Zawe Ashton) goes through a series of failed relationships; she changes her backstory about how her mother's love made her who she is, but the outcome of her relationships is always the same. And an actor's (Big Favourite Round These Parts Oliver Rix) success sees his life become as fake as the character he's playing on screen.