Theatre review: Midnight Movie

The Royal Court has long been at the forefront of trying to put the online world on stage – most recently Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner was an award-winning hit – and now Eve Leigh’s Midnight Movie plunges us into a sleepless night’s distracted browsing. We never meet the play’s protagonist, instead we follow Avatar 1 (Nadia Nadarajah) and Avatar 2 (Tom Penn) as they tell loosely connected stories, some funny, some mystical, many with a creepy edge. The starting point is a YouTube video of a woman in a hotel elevator appearing to fight an invisible monster; when she reached the top of the building she disappeared, only to be discovered months later, drowned in a water tank the laws of physics suggest she couldn’t have got into on her own. It’s a mystery that’s consumed a lot of people’s time, including the narrator’s, who’s obsessed with finding out what really happened; but investigating it online has pitfalls.

Theatre review: Silent Planet

Instead of facing imprisonment, many dissidents in Soviet Russia were given false diagnoses of mental illness, and packed off to insane asylums. It's a subject Tom Stoppard dealt with in epic fashion in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, but Eve Leigh has a much more intimate take on the subject in her new play Silent Planet. A metal grill raised on breeze blocks forms the thrust stage at the Finborough for Tom Mansfield's production, where Gavrill (Graeme McKnight) has to attend regular sessions with his psychiatrist, Yurchak (Matthew Thomas.) Of course, Gavrill is there because of his anti-Soviet writing, and has a number of former associates who are still at large, so these therapy sessions look suspiciously like interrogations, and in between them there's every chance he'll be given some kind of radical treatment that looks just as suspiciously like torture.