Theatre review: After Sunday

Sophia Griffin's debut play After Sunday takes place in the kitchen of a secure hospital, where men with a violent past are held: Some are there directly from prison, like Ty (Corey Weekes,) who just wants to pass his psychiatric evaluation and return to finish his sentence. Others spend much longer there, like Leroy (David Webber,) who seems to have been there for years, and is hoping to finally have made enough progress to be let out to a halfway house. They're among four "service users" who've taken up occupational therapist Naomi's (Aimée Powell) offer of a weekly session - not a class, as they all seem to know what they're doing - of cooking for men from an Afro-Caribbean background. It aims to help their progress by reconnecting them with smells, flavours and routines from their childhoods.

Theatre review: Watch on the Rhine

My first theatre trip of 2023 is to the Donald and Margot Warehouse. It's the show I'd actually planned to open the year with, and that in itself is one up on last year (which started with a bunch of cancelled and hastily-rescheduled performances from 2021.) I went into Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine knowing very little about it beyond the vague blurb on the website, and frankly being able to go in and be surprised is my ideal way to see a show. That blurb promised a German-American family taking in German relatives during the Second World War, before the USA had officially picked a side, so I was prepared for some queasy revelations about where the family's sympathies lie. Instead Hellman has a more defiant message in mind, and director Ellen McDougall delivers a tense domestic thriller about the moral ambiguities of heroism.

Radio review: The Octoroon

So I guess I'm rounding out 2021 in the same way I started it, making up for a lack of live theatre with screen and radio alternatives. A few years ago American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins scored a hit with An Octoroon, his deconstruction of problematic Victorian melodrama The Octoroon. The play worked in its own right but like, I would imagine, most people, I went into it unfamiliar with what it was deconstructing. It's one thing when the source material is Hamlet, but when it's a play whose then-radical sympathy for black lives now comes across as deeply patronising, it's not exactly revived much. So once again Radio 3 provides an alternative, with a 2013 production in which Mark Ravenhill adapted Dion Boucicault's 1859 play set on a Louisiana cotton plantation, where George (Trevor White) has returned to claim his inheritance.

Theatre review: The High Table

The Bush's current season opened with a commitment to telling the stories of queer women of colour, a theme that's revisited in the latest main-house show as actor Temi Wilkey's playwrighting debut The High Table follows the preparations for a British-Nigerian lesbian wedding. It's an event the family are going to have a lot to say about - and not just the living family. Tara (Cherelle Skeete) introduces her parents Segun (David Webber) and Mosun (Jumoké Fashola) to her fiancée Leah (Ibinabo Jack) for the first time three months before the wedding. They've been together for some time and engaged for nine months at this point, so the fact that Tara has put it off for so long suggests she's worried about their reaction. And while they, in theory, accepted her coming out as bisexual a few years earlier, this confirmation that their daughter won't settle down with a man after all makes them show their true colours, and they refuse to attend the wedding.