Theatre review: No Sweat

A quick look at a short but sharp show that aims to shine a light on the disproportionate levels of LGBTQ+ homelessness that's often unnoticed due to the unexpected shelter people find: Writer/director Vicky Moran's semi-verbatim piece No Sweat is set in a gay sauna, whose very nature as a place to disappear in for unspecified periods of time, where drugs and casual sex are the norm, makes it easy to fall through the cracks - possibly on purpose. Tristan (Denholm Spurr) is university educated and sounds posh so generally comes across as well-off, but his middle-class Surrey parents still turned him away when he came out. He treats the sauna as somewhere to rest up, get a shower and watch some TV, but mostly finds shelter through Grindr hookups who also give him breakfast the next morning.

Theatre review: The Chemsex Monologues

Patrick Cash's The Chemsex Monologues has had some good buzz in the last year, but the King's Head's packed schedule (which tends to put shows I might otherwise be interested in on at 9pm on a school night,) meant there wasn't a chance for me to see it; Luke Davies' production now returns and has a couple of matinees, so I managed to fit it in. Although it deals with gay characters I can identify with the play about as much as I can with one set in a remote African village: I've never been a big clubber, my sanity's fragile enough without adding drugs to the mix, and frankly the idea that you could be having enough sex to get bored of it and need chemicals to spice it up seems like science fiction. Still, Cash manages to invoke a world that doesn't seem all that alien in the end, despite revolving around a series of club nights and the private sex parties that follow them, where everyone is on a cocktail of drugs so safe sex easily becomes an afterthought.

Theatre review: The Past is a Tattooed Sailor

Whatever I saw immediately after Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was going to have a tough act to follow, but this is going from the sublime to the ridiculous: Going from a seemingly unlimited budget to zero budget isn't necessarily a bad thing, some of my favourite shows have been in rooms above pubs, including this one. But going from a script carefully crafted by experts to a confused vanity project is something else entirely: Journalist Simon Blow's first, and hopefully last play, The Past is a Tattooed Sailor is based on his own youth and real experiences with an elderly relative (in fact the publicity has been so keen to point out it's about Bright Young Thing Stephen Tennant that I'm not sure why he bothered to change the names.) Upper-class but orphaned and now penniless, Joshua (Jojo Macari) discovers he still has a wealthy relative, his great-uncle Napier (Bernard O'Sullivan,) who had a colourful youth and now lives in a crumbling country house reliving it from his bed.

Theatre review: Othello (Time Zone / Rose Bankside)

It looks like we already know which Shakespeare plays will dominate this year: The usually-rare Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure will be much in evidence, and as for Othello this production at the Rose Bankside is already my second of 2015. Pamela Schermann takes the play out of its military context, cutting the story down to its five central characters who are now City bankers. Othello (James Barnes) has recently promoted young up-and-comer Michael Cassio (Denholm Spurr,) much to the anger of Iago (Trevor Murphy,) who expected the promotion himself. He plots to bring down both men by making Othello suspicious that his wife Desdemona (Samantha Lock) is having an affair with Cassio. It's intended to hurt their careers, but by going for such a personal attack Iago sets off much deadlier consequences.

Theatre review: Romeo and Juliet (Grassroots Shakespeare London / Old Red Lion)

Last summer the Old Red Lion ambitiously tried a classic rep season, and this year they repeat the project - although the theatre's collaborated with a different company, Grassroots Shakespeare London, this time around. The company of young actors bill themselves as employing Original Practices, which means the actors work without a director, and they've come up with their own interpretation of the all-male Jacobethan casts: Their shows are cast gender-blind, although in practice the male-to-female ratio in this ensemble is no more balanced than in any other Shakespeare production. They're calling this Old Red Lion season "The Summer of Love," with the tricky comedy Love's Labour's Lost to come, but first up a tragedy with many fans - but I'm generally not one of them - Romeo and Juliet.