Theatre review: Late Company

The Shaun-Hastings are setting places for a dinner party with people they don't really know. Michael (Todd Boyce) is a conservative politician recently elected to the Canadian Parliament, Debora (Lucy Robinson) a "campaign wife" and one-time artist (a steel cock-and-balls she sculpted is the first thing the audience sees in Zahra Mansouri's design when coming into the Finborough.) They've looked into their guests and are a bit worried that while they themselves are clearly wealthy, Tamara (Lisa Stevenson) and Bill (Alex Lowe) might be the wrong kind of rich, and Debora thinks they're probably a bit vulgar. The reason for this awkward comedy of manners is a lot darker than the surface makes it look. Michael and Debora had a teenage son, Joel, who killed himself some months earlier. Bill and Tamara's son Curtis (David Leopold) was a ringleader among those who bullied him to his death.

Theatre review: The Burnt Part Boys

Not actually about a naked barbecue, The Burnt Part Boys is an American musical set in a West Virginia coal mining community in 1962. Ten years earlier a cave-in caused the death of several miners whose bodies were never recovered; the company promised that the specific area where it happened - now known as the Burnt Part - would stay closed as a tribute, but they're now going back on their word. Jake (Tintin Chris Jenkins,) whose father was one of the dead, has followed him into the job and is now among the first who'll be sent down the reopened tunnels, but when his 14-year-old brother Pete (Joseph Peacock) finds out about it he sees it as a desecration of their father's grave. Bringing along his best friend Dusty (Ryan Heenan) he steals some dynamite and tries to break into the Burnt Part.