Theatre review: Klippies

Continuing the unplanned "African women" theme running through London theatre this year, actress Jessica Siân takes us to South Africa for her impressive playwrighting debut, the coming-of-age story Klippies, A pair of Johannesburg teenagers, poor, white Yolandi (Samantha Colley) and rich, black Thandi (Adelayo Adedayo) are in a couple of the same classes at school, but only really speak once a week, when they both have a long wait to be picked up by their parents from the swimming pool. They slowly build up a friendship that retains a spiky, confrontational edge throughout, even though their mutual affection is real and obvious. Over a long drought season, Thandi tries to help Yolandi out of trouble at school, while Yolandi in turn helps Thandi find a more rebellious side, as they sit by the rich girl's pool smoking and drinking stolen Klipdrift "Klippies" brandy.

Theatre review: East of Berlin

Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch looks at a legacy of the Second World War, the families of Nazi war criminals who fled to South America, in the 1960s-set East of Berlin. Rudi (Jordan McCurrach) grew up in a German ex-pat community in Paraguay, naïvely accepting well into his teens the vague explanation that they had to leave Germany "because they lost." It's only when a classmate makes a crack about science experiments that Rudi realises his father, a dull pharmacist, has a past life as an SS doctor at Auschwitz, who used Jews as human guinea pigs. His disgust and anger at his father lead him to rebel, initially by making sure he gets caught having sex with his gay friend Hermann (Tom Lincoln.) But he really needs to confront his family's dark history, so he assumes the false identity he was originally smuggled out with, and returns to West Berlin.