Theatre review:Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White

Alice Childress' 1966 play about segregation Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White is set in South Carolina in 1918, and the fact that it's the final year of the First World War is a constant underlying theme: Black soldiers like Lula's (Diveen Henry) adopted son Nelson (Patrick Martins) and sailors like Mattie's (Bethan Mary-James) husband are fighting the same as white Americans and risking their lives the same, but in an upcoming celebration Nelson will, like the rest of the black troops, have to add himself to the end of the parade uninvited; and when the war ends, however much they try to convince themselves otherwise, they know their contribution won't be recognised by allowing them into the spaces they're currently forbidden from. But if Lula and Mattie think they've seen it all, their new neighbour will confront them with one more taboo.

Theatre review: Sea Creatures

One of the more baffling and dreamlike plays I've seen in a while, Cordelia Lynn's Sea Creatures seems to have a solid enough setting: A holiday home on an unnamed part of the British coast, where a noted academic brings her family every summer. Shirley (Geraldine Alexander) was the youngest woman ever to be awarded a professorship at her university, but she hasn't published anything for a decade and has become vague and distracted - she's sometimes described as not being able to tell the difference between animate and inanimate objects. Her partner Sarah (Thusitha Jayasundera) is an artist; no matter what the subject of her art is meant to be, she always ends up with a painting of a lobster. Shirley's eldest daughter George (Pearl Chanda) is heavily pregnant but not happy about it, and responds angrily to anyone who points it out, while youngest daughter Toni (Grace Saif) is a childlike 22-year-old.

Theatre review: Deathwatch

The Print Room has now opened what is presumably going to be its main house in the former Coronet cinema: It's what would have been the balcony, with a new floor put in, and the original stalls converted into a bar (the design of which has really embraced the "serial killer's lair" theme of a building with dolls nailed to the bathroom doors.) The fact that the theatre's surroundings are the dilapidated red walls of an old cinema, meanwhile, is a theme that Lee Newby's design has run with, turning the pit into a circus-like stage, with a cage in the middle of the sawdust. It's people, not tigers we'll be watching perform as Geraldine Alexander directs Deathwatch, Jean Genet's play inspired by his own time in prison. The cell is shared by three men and, as the play opens, Lefranc (Danny Lee Wynter) is trying to throttle his cellmate Maurice (Joseph Quinn.)

Theatre review: Holy Warriors

Are they only partly warriors? No! They're...

Holy Warriors is the second of this year's war-themed new commissions at Shakespeare's Globe. The publicity keeps calling David Eldridge's play about the Crusades "kaleidoscopic," a term which strikes me as sounding interesting but not actually meaning anything; but having now seen it I have a bit more of an idea what it's trying to describe, and what the play's attempting to do. It's the story of the crusade of Richard the Lionheart (John Hopkins) that saw him spend most of his reign of England in the Middle East but not, crucially to this play, actually enter Jerusalem. The decision not to hangs over the story as it takes in the conflicts that continue in the area to this day, eventually fusing 12th and 21st centuries as a modern-day Richard resumes his fight against Saladin, hoping to find a way to a different outcome.

Theatre review: In Skagway

A minor alchemical miracle at the Arcola, where they've learned the secret of turning gold into base metal. The gold is in them thar hills - it's the tail end of the American gold rush, which has reached as far as Alaska. The base metal is the leaden thunk of everything else about Karen Ardiff's breathtakingly inept first play In Skagway. Frankie (Angeline Ball) was a terrible actress who, possibly by accident, gave one good performance and traded on it the rest of her life. May (Geraldine Alexander) was her adoring flunky who tirelessly accompanied her around the United States, along with May's daughter T-belle (Kathy Rose O'Brien.) For reasons unknown to god or man, the trio wound up in Skagway, Alaska, where T-belle became a prospector and Frankie had a stroke, leaving her babbling incoherently or, to put it another way, making more sense than any of the other dialogue.

Theatre review: The Empty Quarter

Greg and Holly moved to Dubai as a result of a vague romantic attraction of Holly's to the desert. In fact when we first meet them, Holly (Jodie McNee) is recovering from wandering off out into it and getting lost. Greg (Gunnar Cauthery) hasn't taken to the place and, concerned about his wife's health as she continues to be fascinated by the desert that nearly killed her, quits his job in the hope that it'll shock her into returning to the UK with him. But he's reckoned without the draconian local laws against getting into debt. One missed mortgage payment later and he's in a Middle Eastern prison, and the only way out is a loan from the closest thing they have to friends out there, an older English couple. And a business deal with Gemma (Geraldine Alexander) and Patrick (David Hounslow) ends up looking more like a Faustian pact when the two couples become the only constant in each other's lives.