Theatre review: The Hothouse

I thought part of the idea behind Jamie Lloyd's Trafalgar Transformed season was that there'd be a different configuration for every production? Perhaps I was misinformed, as the second show in the season is again in traverse, in a similar set-up to the one used for Macbeth.

This second show is The Hothouse, a Harold Pinter play but not one that's remotely typical of his work. It's not quite a black comedy, not really a farce and doesn't reach the depths of subtlety that many of his plays do, but it is entertaining, in a twisted way. Roote (Simon Russell Beale) runs a nameless mental institution, assisted by the ruthlessly efficient (or just ruthless) Gibbs (John Simm.) It's Christmas Day but any festive cheer is dulled by the death of one patient, and the fact that another has given birth to the child of a staff member. Most of the staff seem to have an idea of the father's identity, so the hunt is on for a scapegoat - the junior Lamb (Harry Melling) fits the bill.

Theatre review: The Living Room

A rather different meditation on religion tonight than the one I watched last night. Tom Littler revives Graham Greene's first play at Jermyn Street, and like some of Greene's novels it wrestles with the Catholicism he converted to. In The Living Room 20-year-old Rose (Tuppence Middleton,) whose father died when she was a baby, has just lost her mother as well. She is to be placed in the care of her great uncle and two great aunts, in a large London house that appears to have been badly affected during the Blitz. Her uncle James (Christopher Timothy) is a Catholic priest, confined to a wheelchair 20 years previously, so the secret Rose is barely able to keep will be a problem in this household: She's recently started having an affair with Michael (Christopher Villiers,) the much older, married executor of her mother's will.