Theatre review: "Oh, Mary!"

Americans have a tendency to overestimate how much other countries share their national preoccupations, and you can't say that's not the case in whoever decided that London probably cares enough about Mary Todd Lincoln to sustain two different shows about her, a couple of streets apart. For me personally this seemed a bit too much of Abraham Lincoln's first lady to invest in both, so despite Keala Settle playing her in a dramatic version down the road, I went instead for the much more deranged show that's been an award-winning cult hit in New York, Cole Escola's Quote Oh Comma Mary Exclamation Mark End Quote. Mason Alexander Park plays Mary, the drunken First Lady who took to whiskey once she realised being married to the President during a Civil War meant she probably wouldn't be able to realise her dreams of cabaret stardom.

Theatre review: The Normal Heart

A couple of years ago the National Theatre scored one of the biggest hits of the RuNo era with its revival of the iconic American AIDS play, Angels in America. Now the reconfigured Olivier plays host to an earlier work that it's probably safe to say is the seminal work of the genre. First seen in 1985, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart never actually mentions AIDS - not out of any artistic choice, but because we're dealing with a time when the authorities were loath to admit there even was a disease that seemed to be targeting New York's gay men, let alone give it a name. Far from the magical realism of Tony Kushner's epic, Kramer's play deals very much with the down-to-earth. And while Vicki Mortimer's set is dominated by a memorial eternal flame for the victims, and the play is far from short on heartbreak, the main emotion is anger and frustration at a bureaucratic brick wall; one that seems increasingly purpose-built to help purge Reagan's America of a population it would rather see the back of.

Theatre review: Torch Song

Have you ever felt like a theatre's gaslighting you? It's how I felt when the new Turbine Theatre announced its launch show as Harvey Fierstein's iconic 1970s gay play Torch Song, and none of the articles leading up to the production seemed to acknowledge that it's much better known as Torch Song Trilogy. It turns out that no I'm not going mad, yes that is the title of the 1970s play cycle, and yes there is a distinction: This is in fact the 2017 version of the script that Fierstein made significant cuts to, the slight title change differentiating between the two texts. Not that Drew McOnie's production departs from the original structure, even announcing the original plays' titles in neon signs over Ryan Dawson Laight's set. It's a story whose cast grows as it goes on, so opening act "International Stud" lights up just on drag queen Arnold (Matthew Needham) as he gets changed after a show, confessing to the audience how much he longs for a man he truly belongs with in the hedonistic underworld of gay '70s Manhattan.