Theatre review: My Night With Reg

If established theatres were hit hard by lockdown, how bad must it have been for new venues that hadn't had a chance to build up an audience base or cash reserves? The much-trumpeted, shiny new Boulevard Theatre seems, according to its website, to have permanently shuttered after barely getting a chance to open, but across the river at Battersea Power Station Paul Taylor-Mills' Turbine Theatre is back up and running, reopening with a fairly safe bet: Despite its underlying bleakness, Kevin Elyot's My Night With Reg has been consistently popular with audiences: Both its 1990s debut at the Royal Court and the 2010s revival at the Donmar Warehouse got West End transfers. The only question is, was seven years (it feels a lot less) since last seeing the play too soon for me to revisit it?

Theatre review: TINA

Weeder needer nudder hero!

When I was growing up I had Tina Turner’s Private Dancer album on cassette, and there was a period when I needed to listen to it every night to get to sleep, so there are memories associated with many of her songs for me; still, making them the subject of a jukebox musical didn’t automatically appeal. But TINA has a book by Katori Hall (with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Pris) and, having waited a long time to see another play by the author of The Mountaintop, it seemed silly to miss this chance when it presented itself. And while the script isn’t going to be either Hall’s finest hour or the standout part of the evening, the show’s biographical nature means it has to have a darker edge that puts it miles away from director Phyllida Lloyd’s most famous production, Mamma Mia. It undercuts any expectations of being a singalong from the start – the opening notes of “The Best” play, but within a couple of minutes we have the first instance of violence against women.

Theatre review: Stalking the Bogeyman

My theatrical choices have been packed with irony this heatwave, as baking hot fringe theatres are having to pass for some cold locations - last night the Himalayas, tonight Alaska, where journalist David Holthouse's family moved in the late 1970s. Although they didn't know anyone in Anchorage to start with, Nancy (Glynis Barber) and Robert (Geoffrey Towers) quickly made friends with a local couple, whose teenage son was happy to babysit the younger David while their parents held dinner parties. In fact when he was seven, David (Gerard McCarthy) was raped by the then 17-year-old son, whose name he refuses to use, only calling him the Bogeyman (Mike Evans.) Written by Holthouse along with the show's director Markus Potter, Stalking the Bogeyman is a documentary play that does relive this childhood trauma, but centres more on the adult David's desire for revenge.