Theatre review: Stumped

Heading into what could be an odd season of programming at Hampstead, with no funding and no artistic director, it looks like transfers and co-productions could be the way forward for the troubled venue. Downstairs we get a show from Original Theatre, a company that seems to be predominantly creating streaming work, and a play by Shomit Dutta, a classicist who was captain of Harold Pinter's amateur cricket team. Stumped imagines an encounter between Pinter (Andrew Lancel) and another absurdist playwright with a love of cricket. In fact Samuel Beckett (Stephen Tompkinson) had briefly been a professional player in his youth, but at the time that he agreed to join Pinter's team he hadn't played for decades. The two playwrights wait for their turn to bat, Beckett twitchy and superstitious, Pinter injured but booming confidently in his affected dramatic voice.

Stage-to-screen review: Rent

The latest leg of my virtual tour around the UK's theatres takes me to Manchester and the Hope Mill, where Blake Patrick Anderson and Millie O'Connell must be feeling particularly hard done by 2020 - their run in Be More Chill, which for Anderson in particular had been expected to be a star-making performance, got cut short by the first lockdown, and when they reunited for Luke Sheppard's revival of Rent it only lasted five performances before Lockdown 2: Emetic Boogaloo scuppered that as well. Intended to be a mix of socially distanced audiences with simultaneous live-streaming, with Manchester still barred from live performance even after lockdown lifted they've had to rejig the plan, and stream a recording of the final live performance of Jonathan Larson's iconic, none-more-nineties musical.

Theatre review: Dinner With Friends

Like many of the Pulitzer winners I've seen before, Dinner With Friends - Donald Margulies' play won the literary prize in 2000 - concerns itself with middle class American couples spending time in each others' homes. Unlike the others, it isn't actually about racism, or indeed any subject larger than the relationships we see on stage. Food writer Gabe (Shaun Dooley) and his wife Karen (Sara Stewart) are having a friend and her children round for dinner, giving her a blow-by-blow account of their recent holiday in Italy. It's not the relentlessness of their narrative that makes Beth (Finty Williams) suddenly burst into tears though: She said the reason her husband didn't join them at the dinner party was that he was away on business, but in fact he's left her for another woman, and they're now planning to get a divorce.

Theatre review: The House of Mirrors and Hearts

The summer of new British musicals continues with The House of Mirrors and Hearts, an intimate, atmospheric chamber musical with more than a hint of The House of Bernarda Alba in its grief-stricken rooms. Eamonn O'Dwyer provides the songs, and co-writes the book with actor Rob Gilbert, for the story of Anna (Gillian Kirkpatrick) and her family. Her unseen husband custom-makes mirrors, until his sudden and somewhat mysterious death. It involves a broken mirror, so appropriately it's seven years later that we rejoin them. They've been taking in lodgers to help pay the bills, and the latest is Nathan (Jamie Muscato, a late addition to the cast after another actor had to withdraw,) who is researching a local obscure poet and distant ancestor of his. The family as he discovers them are still strangely dominated by their grief for Anna's lost husband.

Theatre review: Farragut North

There's a bit of a crush to get into Southwark Playhouse's Large space at the moment - "no pushing!" barked a woman at me, as she pushed me up against the door-frame so she could get first dibs on the front row. Maybe this excitement is due to the presence of Max Irons, who's pretty much sexually irresistible (at least that's what his dad thinks.) Or maybe everyone just wanted to get up close to Barry off of Eastenders. Irons plays Steve, a 25-year-old who's already press officer for a US Presidential candidate. Farragut North takes place in the runup to the crucial Iowa primaries and the signs are good that Steve's candidate will win the vote to become the Democrats' candidate. But this confidence is shaken with a few days to go when Steve gets a call from a rival campaign's manager (Andrew Whipp) who suggests the polls might not tell the whole story, and it could be time to jump ship.

Theatre review: Titanic

I wonder how many people will turn up at Southwark Playhouse for Titanic the Musical expecting an all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of the James Cameron film? I'm afraid you won't be seeing any high-kicks to "Paint Me Like Your French Girls, Jack" or a curtain-call rendition of "Oops I Did It Again" complete with the bit where the Heart of the Ocean gets retrieved from the depths. Instead, Maury Yeston and Peter Stone's version takes all its characters from real people who sailed on the iconic but doomed liner, some of them staying on to her final destination, others getting off at an earlier, more convenient point. This is a true ensemble piece that tries to build a flavour of all four different groups of people who sailed on Titanic, simplified down to a mostly-American First Class, mostly-English Second Class, mostly-Irish Third Class plus a crew from around the British Isles.