Theatre review: An Ideal Husband

The National Theatre's recent Importance of Being Earnest found a new angle by introducing a formidable Caribbean take on Lady Bracknell, and now Nicholai La Barrie extends that idea by giving us another Oscar Wilde play where the entire cast of characters has been reimagined as first or second generation Caribbean British. In An Ideal Husband class, power and money are constantly intertwined in a relationship that proves precarious as Lord Chiltern (Chiké Okonkwo,) a politician whose career benefited from his personal wealth, gets blackmailed about the source of that wealth: The unscrupulous Mrs Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau) has obtained a letter proving that, at the start of his career, he benefited from his parliamentary knowledge to do a bit of insider trading. She has an investment project of her own on the go, and if Chiltern publicly endorses what is very obviously a scam, she'll keep his secret.

Theatre review: Sappho

Not much is known about Sappho, the ancient Greek poet from Lesbos, except for the fact that what little survives of her work often consists of romantic verse about other women - hence her inspiring both the terms "sapphic" and "lesbian." So Wendy Beckett has carte blanche to create her for her play Sappho, which imagines her falling for a woman while trying to get out of an arranged marriage to a young boy. Why, then, she's chosen to make her such a wet blanket who barely seems to register in her own play until the end is a mystery. Sappho (Georgie Fellows) has an adoring coterie of young women who love her poetry, but she's only interested in Adore (Eleanor Kane.)