Theatre review: The Night Before Christmas

Not too surprisingly for the second week of December, I'm in the middle of six solid days of seasonal¹ offerings, all of them with a slightly different flavour to the traditional Christmas fare. Soho's take is a revisiting of Anthony Neilson's play The Night Before Christmas, which he's rewritten as a musical with lyrics by himself and director Steve Marmion, and music by Tom Mills. There's certainly a creature or two stirring in Neilson's very adult version of the story, set in a warehouse owned by Gary (Navin Chowdhry,) a former city trader and now dealer in counterfeit goods. The toys and gadgets may be fake but he doesn't fancy having them stolen regardless, so when he catches an intruder in an elf costume he ties him up and calls his friend Simon (Craig Kelly.) By the time Simon's arrived though, Gary is convinced the man isn't a burglar at all, but an actual Elf (Craig Gazey,) who claims to have fallen off the sleigh, and needs to be returned before midnight or he'll die.

Theatre review: Chicken

As a tiny West End venue that'll take on any small-scale production that can raise the cash, Trafalgar Studio 2 is always worth keeping an eye on for surprise gems. But by the same token you also get more than your fair share of shows whose very existence on a stage is baffling. Which brings us to New York playwright Mike Batistick's Chicken, a play I'm stumped how to even begin describing, as I'm none the wiser about what Batistick was trying to say with it. Wendell (Craig Kelly) Lives with his heavily pregnant wife Lina (Lisa Maxwell) in a tiny Bronx apartment, and for the last few months Wendell's unemployed oldest friend Floyd (George Georgiou) has been staying on their couch. Wendell wants Floyd to leave, but instead Floyd brings home a sick rooster, which he hopes they can nurse back to health so it can win them a fortune in a cockfight.