Theatre review: James Graham's Sketching

Apparently kicked off by his feeling guilty about having three plays in West End theatres in the last year while other writers struggle to get work staged, James Graham's Sketching sees him take that high profile and use it to put a few emerging playwrights in the spotlight. His idea for doing this was an update of Charles Dickens' early hit Sketches by Boz, a collection of character pieces set around Victorian London, with the gimmick that this would be the first "crowdsourced" play, accepting submissions of short plays that would be woven into the overall story. Eight playwrights' submissions were eventually accepted, and Thomas Hescott directs Samuel James, Penny Layden, Nav Sidhu, Sean Michael Verey and Sophie Wu in around fifty roles between them. Graham himself contributes four storylines that try to link all the different threads together over the course of 24 hours.

Theatre review: As You Like It (Shakespeare's Globe)

The second show from the Globe’s new Michelle Terry-led ensemble is As You Like It, nominally paired with the Hamlet they’re playing it in rep with as “sibling” plays; to be honest what connections the company have found between the plays aren’t too obviously apparent, but if it doesn’t really come across as a double bill that’s no bad thing because where Hamlet was underwhelming, As You Like It is, well, much more like it. Although the idea of gender-blind casting has been gaining traction in recent years, it’s not often it feels as natural as in these ensemble shows – there tends to be the feel of it mainly being male roles assigned to women to redress the gender imbalance, with the odd recasting the other way so it’s not a box-ticking exercise. Not so in these plays, and particularly this one, where the casting announcement was exciting because it seemed more genuinely gender-blind than anything I’ve seen before: Regardless of gender, the roles assigned seemed like ones I thought would be an interesting match to that particular actor.

Theatre review: Don Juan Comes Back From the War

Writing in the 1930s with the Second World War on the horizon, Ödön von Horváth relocated Don Juan to Germany at the end of the First. In Don Juan Comes Back From the War the now middle-aged lothario (Zubin Varla) returns to Berlin in the belief that he can start again where he left off, surrounded by women. But a sudden heart attack proves otherwise and his visit to the hospital is the start of a search for meaning, and perhaps an understanding of where he's been going wrong in thinking he knows anything about love. For all his philandering he had been due to settle down, but left his bride-to-be at the alter before going to war; he now thinks finding her again is the answer.

Ellan Parry is the latest designer to squeeze a raised thrust stage into the Finborough, full of hidden compartments that conceal props, and the clever design helps Andrea Ferran's production give the feel of Don Juan's odyssey through the streets of Berlin. A cast of six play the dozens of women he encounters along the way, and there's a very strong central section when he reunites with a former lover (Rosie Thomson) he's long since forgotten. The production itself, and the performances, are hard to fault, but I've found von Horváth's work hard to click with in the past, and it's the same again here: In the end, the play left me cold.

Don Juan Comes Back From the War by Ödön von Horváth in a version by Duncan Macmillan is booking until the 24th of March at the Finborough Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.