Theatre review: Marriage Material

Split between the late 1960s and the present day in Wolverhampton, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Marriage Material, based on Sathnam Sanghera's 2013 novel, makes a connection between the politics of the two times that's hard to miss: In the first act, Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech is still fresh in everyone's memories, both the white racists who felt emboldened by it, and the immigrant communities who had to deal with the consequences. In the second act there's no single obvious instigator mentioned, but disenfranchised young white men are once again being encouraged to blame their problems on anyone with a different skin colour. These scenes are hard to miss, and they provide an important background to everything that happens to the central characters. What's impressive though is how this comes across without ever becoming what the story is really about.

Theatre review: The Cord

Writer-director Bijan Sheibani has worked with Irfan Shamji multiple times before, so you can see why he'd take advantage of that working relationship to cast the extraordinary actor in his latest play as well, putting him at the centre of an intense mental breakdown in The Cord. It's an evening that put me in mind of The Father, in the sense that it's a brilliant evening of theatre I'm glad I caught, but not necessarily one I'd want to put myself through again. Ash (Shamji) is a new father, whose wife Anya (Eileen O'Higgins) is still recovering from a birth with some complications, but apart from the inevitable lack of sleep is largely settling into her new life, and bonding with the baby. Ash seems to feel slightly excluded from their new group, but it's only after his mother Jane (Lucy Black) visits that this seems to tip over into a more serious mental condition.

Theatre review: Sons of the Prophet

I had mixed feelings about booking for Sons of the Prophet: Stephen Karam's last play at Hampstead Theatre was That American Play Where An Extended Family Gets Together After A Long Time, Preferably At Thanksgiving But That’s Optional, but surely even the most determined American playwrights can't write that one too many times, and the premise and cast were appealing. And the play, which takes its title from the central family's distant and regularly overplayed relation to Kahlil Gibran, is certainly not clichéd in its premise: It centres on two gay brothers from a Lebanese-American Maronite Christian family, from a part of Pennsylvania where all the towns seem to be named after places in the Middle East. A few years after their mother's death, their father also dies in a car crash after a student prank goes wrong.

Theatre review: Chasing Hares

The Cut is a street absolutely packed with restaurants, and on a much more comfortable summer night after a heatwave that means it's bustling when the Young Vic lets out for an interval at 8:40pm. Not just with people eating out - tonight there was a positive Tour de France of Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat delivery riders trying not to crash into each other. It's like a free bit of scene-setting atmosphere for Sonali Bhattacharyya's Chasing Hares, whose framing device sees present-day London food delivery rider Amba (Saroja-Lily Ratnavel) frustrated by the app she works for, which requires her to stay on standby, unpaid, in the hope that an order will come in; as well as needing the money herself, she wants to chip in to help a colleague who's had his bike stolen. This sense of community among riders who in theory should be competing for orders is one her father would like to see harnessed to get them better pay and conditions.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

From Sir Andrew Aguecheek straight to Hamlet is an unusual career progression but it's the one George Fouracres has taken since joining the Globe's ensemble cast last summer. After two standout comic turns the announcement he'd be playing Shakespeare's most famous tragic lead was welcome news to me, especially after the last Hamlet I saw actively played against any trace of humour or likeability in the character. Sean Holmes' production is the first time the play's been tackled indoors in the Swanamaker, and the first in the venue since the current Artistic Director played the role in her opening season. And there's some similarities between this and the Michelle Terry version in a general approach that avoids one overarching conceit; but Holmes' production both takes this experimentation with ideas several steps further, and results in, for my money at least, a much more entertaining - if far from cohesive - evening overall.

Theatre review: Metamorphoses

With the last few outdoor shows at Shakespeare's Globe still running, the summer season concludes by taking us back inside the Swanamaker for the delayed end result of the new Scriptorium project: Billed as the first time the Globe has had a team of writers-in-residence in 400 years, the first year of the project culminated in the team of Sami Ibrahim, Laura Lomas and Sabrina Mahfouz collaborating on a play that, appropriately enough, mixes the old with the new. The stories are almost as old as they get, with a collection of Greco-Roman mythology as collected by Ovid in his Metamorphoses; the storytelling style, treating the stories with a mix of respect and irreverence, is both fresh and well-suited to the intimate space. Sean Holmes and Holly Race Roughan direct a cast of four - Steffan Donnelly, Fiona Hampton, Charlie Josephine and Irfan Shamji - who tell some of the best-known, as well as some of the more obscure myths, especially those, as the title suggests, that feature their lead characters going through a magical transformation.

Theatre review: The Arrival

In a year when many theatre professionals have been branching out into new fields, prolific director Bijan Sheibani presents his first show as playwright at the Bush. Taking particular inspiration from his productions of The Brothers Size and Barber Shop Chronicles, The Arrival looks at the relationship between two men who only find out in their late twenties that they’re brothers. Tom’s (Scott Karim) biological father had Middle Eastern heritage, so he always knew his white parents had adopted him; what was a surprise, when he eventually sought out his birth parents, was that they were still married, and had had two more children, who they kept. His sister now lives in Germany but his brother Samad (Irfan Shamji) has, by coincidence, moved to the same part of London as him, and when the two meet up they instantly get on. The play opens as they start to spend time together and get to know each other.

Theatre review: Dance Nation

Concluding a season of work by female playwrights at the Almeida is Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, a funny, touching and sometimes devastating look at what it’s like to be a pre-teen girl, all framed within a national dance competition. The bullying Dance Teacher Pat (Brendan Cowell) rules the roost over a class of girls no older than 13 (all played by actors from their twenties to their fifties,) and as the trophies surrounding Samal Blak’s set can attest, has masterminded wins in dance competitions across America. Right from the start, when one girl is injured and never seen or heard of again, it’s obvious that failure is not an option, and this year’s crop of girls can either join the hall of fame – perhaps even becoming a legend like the one alumna who got into the chorus of a Broadway show – or be forgotten.

Theatre review: One For Sorrow

Some day I’ll see a play where well-meaning but essentially ineffectual liberals don’t turn into dribbling racists within minutes of being placed in an extreme situation; Cordelia Lynn’s One For Sorrow is not that play. A bomb has gone off in a West London nightclub, and terrorists are still in there with hundreds of hostages, threatening to detonate a second one. A middle-class family living in the area have effectively barricaded themselves into their home as the sound of sirens and helicopters comes in from outside, and while younger daughter Chloe (Kitty Archer) walks into the living room every few minutes with an updated death toll, her sister Imogen (Pearl Chanda) has attempted to be more proactive: In a plot inspired by a real event after a bombing in France when people opened their doors to strangers who’d been left stranded and scared, she’s posted #OpenDoor on Twitter, to indicate that anyone feeling unsafe nearby could go to her for help.

Theatre review: Mayfly

If plays about forgotten corners of the countryside have been the low-key growing trend of the last couple of years, then the Orange Tree has been the theatre quietly putting itself at the forefront of it; and even if it's not quite another Jess and Joe Forever, Joe White's Mayfly is the second impressive playwrighting debut of the week (and the second one touching on grief, as it happens.) Cat's (Niky Wardley) horoscope says today is the day a special person will appear out of the blue, and the play's conceit is that it's right: Within a couple of hours Harry (Irfan Shamji) has met all three members of her family, starting when he pulls her husband Ben (Simon Scardifield) out of a river. Ben was trying to down himself because today marks the one-year anniversary of the death of his son.