Theatre review: The Convert

A couple of past successes will be coming back for Christopher Haydon's final season of programming at the Gate, and after the success of Eclipsed* he brings back writer Danai Gurira for an unusually long and epic play by the venue's usual standards: The Convert is set in late Victorian Rhodesia, where both Catholic and Protestant churches have made slight inroads in converting the locals. Taken from his family as a child, Chilford (Stefan Adegbola) is a devout Catholic, helping the local priest and frustrated by the fact that an old rival has been accepted to the priesthood, as he himself had hoped to be the first black African priest. He's never managed to get anyone quite as enthusiastic about the white men's religion as he is - his housekeeper Mai Tamba (Clare Perkins) goes through the motions but also performs good luck magic when he's not looking. But her niece Jekesai (Mimi Ndiweni) is a different story.

Theatre review: Diary of a Madman

A loose adaptation from Gogol, Diary of a Madman does deal with mental illness, but it doesn’t do so explicitly for its first hour, instead setting a detailed scene. Al Smith’s Scottish transposition takes inspiration from the popular metaphor of the Forth Bridge, said to take so long to paint that by the time it’s done the other end needs starting again. Here it becomes the job of a single family who’ve been doing it for generations, Pop Sheeran (Liam Brennan) taking a year to put on each new coat before going back to the start. His son’s unable to help him at the moment so the company that manages the bridge has sent along Matthew (Guy Clark,) an English post-grad at Edinburgh University, whose thesis studies the effectiveness of a new formulation of paint intended to cut down on all this work. In one of those plot-driving coincidences, Matthew then discovers that Pop’s teenage daughter Sophie (Louise McMenemy) is the girl he slept with a few weeks earlier.

Theatre review: The Iphigenia Quartet - Agamemnon and Clytemnestra

Two more points of view on the story of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis at the Gate as part of The Iphigenia Quartet; you can read my review of Iphigenia and Chorus here, but tonight Caroline Bird gets arguably the toughest job, of trying to see things from the perspective of Agamemnon. Although it's his brother whose wife has been abducted, Agamemnon (Andrew French) is leading the Greek charge to get her back, and is therefore the man in the spotlight. Bird focuses on him not as a bloodthirsty villain but as a rather weak man buffeted by circumstance and unable or unwilling to stand up to it. As the play begins he's consented to the sacrifice of his daughter but changed his mind, sending a letter to his wife telling her to stay away. It's too late, of course, and besides the Messenger (Louise McMenemy) is brutally pragmatic about the Greek cause and makes sure the letter doesn't reach Clytemnestra.

Theatre review: The Christians

Post-show Q&As often unearth information that reveals much about more than just the production in hand - like the Gate's Artistic Director being an atheist whose mother is a vicar, a contrast he credits as one of the reasons he's often drawn to work with a religious theme. Such as his latest production The Christians, by American playwright Lucas Hnath. An additional draw in this case was the fact that Hnath's mother is also a preacher, albeit in an Evangelical church, and that's where, in an unnamed part of the US, the story takes place. Pastor Paul (William Gaminara) has spent 20 years building a congregation from the ground up, until it's become that most American of phenomena, a Megachurch with worshipers in their thousands. They got into debt to build it but they've finally paid it off, a fact whose timing will become of particular interest as the story plays out.

Theatre review: Image of an Unknown Young Woman

In an unspecified country with a poor human rights record and a corrupt government, a woman wearing a yellow dress offers no resistance when the police attack and shoot her. Her identity and fate are unknown, but the attack is being filmed and the clip soon goes viral worldwide - as the story begins, a chorus of Oliver Birch, Emilie Patry and Isaac Ssebandeke send each other the link and react with a mixture of horror and voyeuristic excitement. Elinor Cook's Image of an Unknown Young Woman follows the repercussions of the image becoming public, both in the country itself where it sparks protests that could even become a revolution, and internationally. Although the character names suggest we're in a Middle Eastern country, the colourblind casting and stark, industrial design in Christopher Haydon's production at the Gate lend the story a universality - and unpredictability.

Theatre review: The Edge of Our Bodies

The Gate has recently played host to a number of memorable monologues, and although Adam Rapp's The Edge of Our Bodies features, for a few moments, a second character¹, in practice it's another one-woman show. Shannon Tarbet plays Bernadette, who's 16, pregnant, and has run away from her Connecticut boarding school to visit her boyfriend in New York. But before she gets a chance to break the news it becomes obvious he's trying to avoid her. Instead, Bernadette spends some time with her boyfriend's dying father, before an ill-advised encounter in a bar, as she resolves to decide on her own what to do about her situation. The Edge of Our Bodies is the first in a new season focusing on female identity entitled "Who Does She Think She Is?" and the journey of a teenage girl is an obvious fit to this theme.

Theatre review: Twelve Angry Men

There's lots of shows opening in the West End right now and for a moment I thought tonight's had got a bit confused: The sound effect of a speeding train over the opening made me wonder if I'd rocked up at the Hitchcock adaptation a week early. But the sound turns out to be on-theme for this stage transfer of another famous film, which Reginald Rose adapted from his own 1954 screenplay. The Twelve Angry Men in question are the jury in a murder case, twelve white men deciding whether a black teenager stabbed his father in the middle of the night. Eleven jurors immediately cast their guilty vote but Juror 8 (Television's Martin Shaw) has reasonable doubt, and asks only that the rest take the time to discuss the case before condemning a man to death. The evidence is largely circumstantial but there's a lot of it - yet it turns out to be easier to poke holes in than the perfunctory defence made it look in court.

Theatre review: Grounded

A female fighter pilot flying missions in Iraq and Afghanistan is an interesting subject matter in itself, but it's just the starting point for George Brant's intense monologue Grounded. The Pilot (Lucy Ellinson) is at the top of her game, and in attitude as well as skill she's one of the guys. Back in the US on leave, she finally meets a man who's not intimidated by what she does, and their love story leads to marriage and pregnancy. But the latter isn't compatible with flying jets in a war, and when she returns from maternity leave the Pilot ends up doing the same job in a very different way: Her new plane is a remote-controlled drone, and while it surveys Afghanistan she's in a different desert, doing 12-hour shifts in a trailer outside Las Vegas, and at the end of the day she can go home to her family.

Theatre review: Purple Heart

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The Gate invites the official reviewers in tomorrow night.

Pulitzer-winning Clybourne Park author Bruce Norris has a new play debuting at the Royal Court at the end of the month, but first one of his earlier plays gets its first UK showing courtesy of Christopher Haydon at the Gate. We're in a traverse again in Simon Kenny's design for Purple Heart, looking in on a typically beige 1970s living room, in some unnamed American suburb. A few months ago, Lars died in Vietnam. His alcoholic widow Carla (Amelia Lowdell) has been left to look after teenage son Thor (Oliver Coopersmith,) with the unwanted help of mother-in law Grace (Linda Broughton.) With Grace trying to thwart Carla's attempts to get hold of alcohol, their Saturday evening seems dramatic enough, but things take an odder turn at the arrival of what seems to be another person offering condolences: Purdy (Trevor White,) an old army buddy of Lars'.

Theatre review: The Trojan Women

After a successful first season of "Revolt," Christopher Haydon at the Gate looks at "Aftermath," and first in the new season is Euripides' classic of those left behind when the fighting ends, The Trojan Women. Poet and playwright Caroline Bird has come up with a loose translation of the play that brings the language and action bang up to date. The war has just ended, and the Trojan men have been killed. The women are waiting in a hospital to find out which Greek general will claim each of them as his slave or concubine. Their babies are being taken from them - allegedly to be raised as Greeks, but it looks likely the reality is grimmer. Lucy Ellinson's Chorus is heavily pregnant, not far from giving birth. The only other occupant of the maternity ward is Troy's former Queen, Hecuba (Dearbhla Molloy,) put in the relatively quiet ward as the one remaining mark of respect afforded to her.

Theatre review: The Prophet

The second in Christopher Haydon's debut trio of plays about revolution and revolutionaries, and his first as director since taking over at the Gate, takes us to the "Friday of Rage," the 28th of January 2011, early in the eighteen days of Egyptian uprising against President Mubarak. Hassan Abdulrazzak's The Prophet is partly assembled from interviews with a number of Egyptians who took part in the marches, but instead of presenting them as a verbatim piece, the author wraps them up in the story of an apparently ordinary middle-class couple. Layla (Sasha Behar) is an engineer for Vodafone, which puts her on the wrong side of her own principles when the government demand the mobile network be cut off to stop the protesters communicating with each other. Hisham (Nitzan Sharron) is a former journalist who's written one well-received novel. His follow-up book, about a prophet figure in modern-day Egypt, is stalled by writer's block.