Rehearsed reading review: The Wooden Meadow

I should be at the Finborough Theatre a fair bit in the next week, because as well as their regular Tuesday-Sunday show it’s also time for the annual Vibrant Festival of new writing, and for the first time in a few years I can make a couple of rehearsed readings I was interested in. First up Stewart Pringle, who was Artistic Director of the Old Red Lion pub theatre for three years, has written a play about a pub theatre that’s not too far from Sadler’s Wells and may or may not have a slightly laissez-faire attitude towards fire safety laws*. The protagonist of The Wooden Meadow has been running the place for a bit longer than three years – Jim (Ian Redford) has been there since at least the late eighties, when he had a few big successes with new writing, including the bizarre-sounding war epic the play is named after. Audiences have long since dropped off though, budgets are non-existent and the brewery demands heavy footfall or it’ll turn the space into a function room, but Jim ploughs on.

Theatre review: But It Still Goes On

I think most theatres wore out their commitment to commemorating the First World War in 2014, so it hasn't dominated programming in the centenary of its final year like it did in the first. But the Finborough is still committed to its THEGREATWAR100 strand, and Millennials feeling under constant attack from their grandparents' generation might take some small comfort from But It Still Goes On, in which even those who fought in the trenches are regularly dismissed as feckless wasters. In fact there's a strong feel of "it was ever thus" to much of Robert Graves' play. Best known for I, Claudius, which due to a sacred rule of comedy I have to pronounce "I, Clavdivs," Graves was commissioned to write the play in 1929 but it was never produced - possibly because the producers of Journey's End were expecting a similar story of life in the trenches, rather than one of how the survivors have to move on with very little help from those they fought for.