Theatre review: In Praise of Love

1973's In Praise of Love is one of Terence Rattigan's last plays, a time when his star was in the descendant, and at times it does feel like we're going to be in for the work of a playwright whose best days are behind him. But like its characters, it's got hidden depths to take you by surprise. Sebastian Cruttwell (Dominic Rowan) is a literary critic for a Sunday paper, a vocal Marxist with undisguised contempt for anyone who doesn't share his belief in the theory, but not particularly keen on discussing how the USSR worked out in practice. After the end of WWII he met Estonian refugee Lydia (Claire Price) in Berlin's British quarter, and married her so she could come back to England, with the intention of divorcing once she got her citizenship. Decades on they're still married, and have a 20-year-old son, Joey (Joe Edgar,) who to his father's disgust campaigns for the Liberal Party.

Theatre review: Something in the Air

Veteran playwright Peter Gill's latest play could be said to join the ranks of the new generation of AIDS stories most prominently including It's A Sin and Cruise, although its focus is slightly different: Part of the theme of those stories has been the generation of queer elders who barely exist because of the pandemic of the 1980s and '90s wiping them out, but Something in the Air brings us a pair of men who've survived into old age and, with the rest of their community long-gone, have found some comfort in each other. Colin (Ian Gelder) and Alex (Christopher Godwin) live in the same retirement home where they've become friends and, to the consternation of Alex's son Andrew (Andrew Woodall,) have started holding hands while they sit in their armchairs. Colin's niece Clare (Claire Price) is more sanguine about it, and in fact has some news for Andrew: The pair have asked to be moved into the same room, but as they're not always lucid, it needs to be run by their families.

Theatre review: The Taming of the Shrew(RSC / RST & tour)

With Shakespeare's plays so well-known, and the amount of people who presumably include a theatre trip to one of the plays, whichever one's playing, in a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, the RSC must get more than its share of audience members who don't really look at the description of the show. You could even miss the fact that Justin Audibert's production of The Taming of the Shrew was going to be notably high-concept. That would explain the "ooooohhhh"s of sudden understanding, after opening scenes full of women eager to push the plot forward, when Baptista (Amanda Harris) introduces her eldest and most difficult son, Katherine (Joseph Arkley.) Audibert's idea isn't to cross-cast the play but to set it in an alternate 1590 (the likely year of the play's premiere,) in which the world has developed exactly the same, but as a matriarchy. So wealthy women like Baptista run the show, and their sons depend on marriage to secure their futures. But the yobbish Katherine is too independent to attract a husband when there's more compliant men like his brother Bianco (James Cooney) around.

Re-review: King Lear (Duke of York's)

King Lear is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays and I must have seen at least a dozen productions by now, so I don't say it lightly that Jonathan Munby's Chichester production from last year was the best I've seen yet - in fact I chose it as my overall favourite show of 2017. With Ian McKellen in the titular role it was always going to make commercial sense to transfer it to London, and I wasn't going to miss the chance to see it again even if I knew the changes that come with a transfer meant it couldn't quite match up to the original experience. For one thing, the Duke of York's might be a small theatre by West End standards but it's a world away from the intimacy of the Minerva, where even sitting near the back of the theatre only actually translated to the fifth row or thereabouts, and the cast made lots of entrances and exits by an aisle right next to me.