Theatre review: Bury the Dead

Back in 2014 theatres were falling over themselves to stage seasons built around 100 years from the start of the First World War, but the Finborough took a slightly different approach: Calling the strand THEGREATWAR100, they committed instead to revisiting the theme sporadically over the whole five years from the centenary of war breaking out, to the centenary of the Armistice. Which brings us very neatly to today and the concluding part of the series, and after a number of different approaches to the legacy of the trenches we get 1930s American Expressionism in Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead. That’s what the soldiers are trying to do at the start of the play, 48 hours after a failed advance left six of their friends dead, and they’re in a hurry to get on with it as the bodies are starting to smell. But while the men are indisputably dead they don’t act like it, rising from their graves and refusing to get back into them.

Theatre review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the one story Oscar Wilde chose to tell in novel rather than play form, but this is something others have been trying to change ever since - so far I've seen adaptations including a musical and a ballet. The latest to bring it to the stage is professional Wilde descendant Merlin Holland, who adapts it with John O’Connor. Dorian Gray (Guy Warren-Thomas) is a rich and handsome young man who's caught the attention of London's aesthetes, and enthusiastically become one of them. Lord Henry (Gwynfor Jones) tells him that his youth and beauty are his defining qualities, and this leads Dorian to fixate on his fear of losing them. He makes a wish that he would sell his soul if the portrait just painted of him by Basil (Rupert Mason) aged while he got to keep his looks. When it comes true, he embarks on a life of debauchery seemingly without consequences.