Theatre review: Clyde's

Lynn Nottage is having a fairly high-profile year in London - we've had The Secret Life of Bees, and hot on the heels of Mlima's Tale at the Kiln, it's back to the Donald and Margot Warehouse where Sweat was staged in 2019. Clyde's takes place in a shared universe with the latter play, as well as sharing a director in Lynette Linton, and while it shows the American playwright to have lost none of her enthusiasm for tackling a heavy subject, it also displays much more of a light touch. The titular establishment is a truck stop diner run by ex-con Clyde (Gbemisola Ikumelo,) who exclusively hires other former inmates who can't find work anywhere else. Although to what extent this is her attempting to help them is a different story, as her managerial style is full supervillain - she likes to keep them terrified of her and remind them that if they don't toe the line and she fires them, nobody else will give them a job.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night (Young Vic)

The Young Vic gets its first new artistic director in nearly twenty years as Kwame Kwei-Armah debuts in carnival fashion with a show first seen in New York two years ago: A musical adaptation of Twelfth Night. Kwei-Armah heavily edits Shakespeare’s text, something made easier by the inclusion of Shaina Taub’s original songs, whose modern-language lyrics help summarise and move on the story so that the whole thing comes in at well under two hours. Originally set in New Orleans, Kwei-Armah and Oskar Eustis’ production has been relocated to Notting Hill for its UK premiere, with Robert Jones’ thrust stage creating a long road where Viola (Gabrielle Brooks) is washed up after a storm, right into a funeral – but a lively one that turns into a street party, only the deceased’s sister Olivia (Natalie Dew) keeping up the mourning for long. It’s too long for Duke Orsino (Rupert Young,) who’s determined to woo her despite her obvious lack of interest.

Theatre review: Hopelessly Devoted

My second play in a week about women in prison, although unlike in Pests the central character of Hopelessly Devoted is still inside, and likely to stay that way for some time. Chess (Cat Simmons) murdered her abusive husband, and in the years she's been in jail she's been denied access, or any kind of knowledge of, her daughter who would now be 13. What's helped her stay calm and out of despair is the arrival of cellmate Serena (Gbemisola Ikumelo,) with whom she regularly breaks into song, the pair eventually becoming a couple. But theft doesn't carry as long a sentence as murder and Serena's up for parole soon. Chess needs something else to get her through her sentence, and as author Kate Tempest is also a poet and rapper, it's perhaps not surprising that she offers music up as that alternative.