Theatre review: The Wind and the Rain

If the Finborough Theatre still exists in 90 years' time (still somehow based in an inaccessible room that people are constantly trying to evict them from, above a pub that's due to have gone bankrupt another 18 times by then,) I imagine they'll be staging 2:22 A Ghost Story, with a blurb marvelling at the fact that it played half the theatres in the West End with a rotating cast of random women with big Instagram followings. That (minus the Instagram part) seems to have been the story of The Wind and the Rain in 1933, with Merton Hodge's semi-autobiographical play about his student days also fitting in a successful Broadway run before vanishing without trace. In other words it's a textbook Finborough rediscovery, and one that, while amiable enough, left me trying to pick apart exactly what could have made it so popular.

Theatre review: Under the Blue Sky

AMATEUR PRODUCTION DISCLAIMER: As usual, I like to point out that drama school presentations are officially classified as amateur productions; and as usual, I'm going to ignore that in the way I review this, as everyone involved could be professional very soon.

And so to one of my occasional trips to LAMDA's public performances, where I try to spot stars of the future and (spoiler alert!) fail miserably. David Eldridge's Under the Blue Sky premiered in 2000, and I last saw it when it was revived in the West End ten years ago, but there are moments when you can see the through-line in Eldridge's writing with his most recent hit, Beginning. A triptych of loosely connected scenes all involving teachers at an Essex public school, Under the Blue Sky opens with Nick (Barney Fishwick,) who works at a rough East London school, inviting his best friend and colleague Helen (Helen Reuben) for a meal to tell her he's planning to take a job at the private school. For the idealistic Helen this is a blow as she believes they can do the most good where they are, but her anger is really down to the fact that she was hoping the dinner was about something else - she's been not-so-secretly in love with Nick for years, and thought he was going to confess he feels the same.