Theatre review: anthropology

After a quiet summer Hampstead Theatre kicks off its new season with anthropology, Lauren Gunderson's play that takes the very topical subject of AI and... well, it's not particularly clear what, if anything, it does with it. Angie (Dakota Blue Richards) has been missing, presumed dead, since she disappeared at college a couple of years ago in a suspected kidnapping. Her sister Merrill (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) is a Something Something Computers, who is processing the loss by creating an algorithm that's been fed all the digital information Angie left behind, and as the play begins she switches it on for the first time, finding that - apart from being a bit nicer than the real thing - the digital version is an uncannily accurate representation that seems to know her sister in ways even her programmer doesn't.

Theatre review: James Graham's Sketching

Apparently kicked off by his feeling guilty about having three plays in West End theatres in the last year while other writers struggle to get work staged, James Graham's Sketching sees him take that high profile and use it to put a few emerging playwrights in the spotlight. His idea for doing this was an update of Charles Dickens' early hit Sketches by Boz, a collection of character pieces set around Victorian London, with the gimmick that this would be the first "crowdsourced" play, accepting submissions of short plays that would be woven into the overall story. Eight playwrights' submissions were eventually accepted, and Thomas Hescott directs Samuel James, Penny Layden, Nav Sidhu, Sean Michael Verey and Sophie Wu in around fifty roles between them. Graham himself contributes four storylines that try to link all the different threads together over the course of 24 hours.