Theatre review: The Treatment

The latest Almeida season opens with Martin Crimp's 1993 play The Treatment - "treatment" as in the summary of a movie pitch, as well as the way people treat each other. Anne (Aisling Loftus) is describing a difficult life, culminating in her marriage: Kept in a small apartment she never leaves, her husband would sometimes tie and gag her, not to abuse her physically but to give lengthy speeches, waxing lyrical about car parks and strip lights. She's telling her story to Jennifer (Indira Varma) and Andrew (Julian Ovenden,) married as well as being producing partners, and interested in developing her story. They bring in down-and-out playwright Clifford (Ian Gelder) to script it, and bombastic actor John (Gary Beadle) to play the husband, as well as to provide some star wattage that'll attract investors.

theatre review: a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun)

debbie tucker green is one of the few playwrights who seems to get away with directing the premiere productions of her own work. this may be because, despite a poetic quality they all share, each of her plays has a very distinct feel, and the way they're staged is often integral to that. take her latest, a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun), which marks itself out as doing things differently as soon as you walk into the royal court upstairs: merle hensel's set design is like an inverted thrust staging, with the five actors on a raised stage that runs around three of the walls, while the audience sits in the middle on stools, turning to watch the action. sometimes the actors perform together, others they stand across the room from each other, delivering their lives over the audience's heads. and that's a very on-theme metaphor for a play about the way love can alternately attract and repel people.

Theatre review: Les Blancs

It was left unfinished on playwright Lorraine Hansberry's death, but the National saw enough merit in Les Blancs to get adaptor Robert Nemiroff and director Yaël Farber to create a stageable version of this African epic: In an unspecified post-war, colonial African country, a European mission operates a very basic hospital. The influential pastor is unseen, off on some apparently regular trek into the jungle, but his blind wife Madame Neilsen (Siân Phillips) is there to meet American journalist Charlie Morris (Elliot Cowan,) there in search of the real story of a country whose decades of foreign rule have finally led to increasing black-on-white violence. Not satisfied with only getting the white side of the story, he focuses on a trio of brothers, all of whom are outsiders in some way, who've returned to the area for their father's funeral; particularly middle brother Tshembe (Danny Sapani,) who's spent years travelling the world and has a white wife in London.

Theatre review: Hapgood

Howard Davies looks around the Tom Stoppard back catalogue and finds something of an oddity in Hapgood, a Cold War spy drama that opens with a dead letter drop in a swimming pool's changing rooms, with multiple briefcases and identically-dressed men making it look less like an exchange of secrets, more like a game of Find the Lady. Hapgood, codenamed Mother (Lisa Dillon,) is the British spymaster in charge of this operation, and when it goes Hapwrong it becomes obvious that someone on the team is betraying them. Suspicion seems to rest firmly on Ridley (Gerald Kyd,) but Hapgood's boss Blair (Tim McMullan) seems to think he can only have done it if she was in on it too. Or maybe he doesn't suspect her at all - the characters are all constantly trying to trip each other up in a series of traps and bluffs.

Theatre review: We Know Where You Live

Steven Hevey's We Know Where You Live first turned up at the Finborough as one of the rehearsed readings in 2013's Vibrant season, but its return for a full staging couldn't have been better timed, as the hipsters of East London fret that a new Pret A Manger might destroy a local history that stretches back as far as four whole years into the distant past. The play's central character, Ben (Matt Whitchurch) isn't quite as irony-deficient as that, but he still finds himself at odds with seemingly everyone about how important the history of his little corner of London is. Because in another of this year's plays looking at the spiraling cost of housing, this one focuses particularly on gentrification: Architect Ben and his fabric designer girlfriend Asma (Ritu Arya) can't find anywhere they can afford, until a ground-floor flat in an unnamed Hackney neighbourhood becomes available - and even then Asma's wealthy father needs to chip in with the rent.

Theatre review: The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco

Set in 1986, in a Zimbabwe still finding its post-independence feet, Andrew Whaley's The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco is set in a police station cell in the middle of the night. Getting aggressive with the police has landed Chidhina (Kurt Egyiawan,) Jungle (Gary Beadle) and Febi (Joan Iyiola) in here, and they're bickering their way through the night when a fourth prisoner materialises, seemingly out of nowhere. Ragged, wrapped in a tattered blanket and looking confused and afraid, he initially doesn't speak but it eventually comes out that Comrade Fiasco (Abdul Salis) was a freedom-fighter in the late 1970s. Hiding in a mountain cave for safety, he ended up losing track of time and only being discovered eight years later. By the time he rejoined the world the independence he was fighting for had been achieved, and the Zimbabwe he now sees isn't the one he knew.

Theatre review: Banksy: The Room in the Elephant

A true story provides the inspiration at the Arcola's smaller studio, but it's a starting point which can lead in a couple of different directions. Tachowa Covington is a homeless man who spent seven years living in an abandoned water tank in the Hollywood hills, kitting it out into a real home that even had its own CCTV system. The tank became a focus of attention when the graffiti artist Banksy wrote THIS LOOKS A BIT LIKE AN ELEPHANT on the side. Suddenly the tank is a piece of art with a measurable financial value, and Tachowa was kicked out. Banksy: The Room in the Elephant is Tom Wainwright's fictionalised version of his story; the monologue is followed by Hal Samples' short documentary film Something From Nothing, which features the real Tachowa's life in the tank, and the circumstances that saw him kicked out of it.