Theatre review: Sweet Bird of Youth

I had a feeling that Daniel Evans taking over as Artistic Director of Chichester's theatres would make me break my previous rule of not making the trip to West Sussex; and with Ian McKellen revisiting King Lear there later this year it proved a bit too tempting. So in for a penny, in for a pound, I ended up booking three shows in the two theatres, and why not when there's the chance to see Brian J. Smith in another Tennesse Williams play only months after his memorable performance in The Glass Menagerie? This time he's Chance Wayne, the wannabe actor, more realistically a hustler, in Sweet Bird of Youth. A couple of weeks before we first meet him, Chance hooked up with a woman calling herself the Princess Kosmonopolis, who 's paying for a luxury lifestyle in return for his discreet companionship.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - Ivanov

This may be Young Chekhov but it's already time for a midlife crisis play in the middle section of Jonathan Kent's productions of David Hare's translations. Ivanov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) is 35 and depressed, feeling trapped in his home with consumptive wife Anna Petrovna (a completely different Anna Petrovna but again played by Nina Sosanya, showing range as she goes from educated woman to completely dependent on her husband's attention,) and his bombastic uncle Count Shabyelski (Peter Egan, from the 1980s.) As with the characters in Platonov, property doesn't always come with the money to maintain it, and Ivanov is hugely in debt to the two women who between them control the town's finances. Ivanov begins an affair with Sasha (Olivia Vinall,) daughter of his main creditor.

Theatre review: Variation on a Theme

The latter years of Terence Rattigan's life saw a decline in his popularity as the Kitchen Sink playwrights knocked him out of favour, and Variation on a Theme had a particularly unfortunate part to play in his story: It was the play Shelagh Delaney saw, and was so unimpressed by it propelled her to try and do better herself. Rattigan would eventually, posthumously, reclaim his place on British stages, with his better-known plays getting plenty of major revivals in recent years, but it takes the Finborough to unearth Variation on a Theme again half a century after it was last seen. And with the play Delaney wrote in response, A Taste of Honey, enjoying a major revival at the National right now, what better time to reevaluate whether Rattigan's offering deserves its ignominious place in history.