Theatre review: Losing Venice

Will the Orange Tree's 2018-19 season have an overarching theme? I only ask because they'll shortly be staging some Martin Crimp, and following Losing Venice that could end up signaling a theme of complete impenetrability. Jo Clifford's 1985 play has been revived by Paul Miller with the strong implication that it's gained a new Brexit-related significance, dealing as it does with a fading Empire that's not quite grasped the fact that it no longer holds the sway it once did, and so engages in an arrogant international display of regaining control that's doomed to failure. In practice this proves a bit of a stretch of what the play's actually about, its blustering imperialism more about the macho posturing of a couple of impotent men than anything wider.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - Platonov

Another theatrical marathon day as a trio of productions originally seen in Chichester come to the Olivier. Jonathan Kent directs David Hare translations of Anton Chekhov's early work, grouped together and played either individually or in one day as Young Chekhov. First up is the playwright's first, unfinished full-length play Platonov, in which a rural community deal with twin obsessions of sex and money - too much of one and not enough of the other. Cash is thin on the ground for the upper-class widow Anna Petrovna (Nina Sosanya,) who's running her late husband's estate entirely on loans from local loan shark Shcherbuk (David Verey,) but she's still a young woman and the wealthy Porfiri (Jonathan Coy) has proposed. But Anna only has eyes for the same man all the other local women do.