Theatre review: Monster Raving Loony

You do tend to get a little something extra when you're in the audience for a James Graham play; The Man had its receipts, Privacy came with airline safety-style instruction cards, while his latest, Monster Raving Loony, comes with a whole goody bag on every seat, containing party hat, bingo card, raffle ticket and a gift - mine had a party blower but I spotted comedy mustaches and plastic Groucho Marx glasses elsewhere*. This being Graham, the sort of party this is is a political party, but not the kind with actual hopes of winning an election - in fact one rule of the Monster Raving Loony Party was that anyone who actually won their seat would be expelled from the party. This is the story of Screaming Lord Sutch, born in 1940 as David Sutch (Samuel James) in Harrow, North London, growing up in a cluttered house with his widowed mother while the nearby public school churned out future ministers.

Theatre review: Symphony

I'm back at the Vault Festival underneath Waterloo station, this time to catch two short shows in a night. First up, nabokov's Symphony, in which three playwrights contribute stories to be performed by a quartet of actor-musicians, to music by Ed Gaughan. Remy Beasley, Jack Brown, Iddon Jones and Adam Sopp are a multi-talented lot who all play numerous instruments in a show that's set up to look like a rock gig. Dressed in bolier suits, first to strip his off is Iddon Jones, who reveals a tiny pair of shorts and a singlet. The writer is the currently-ubiquitous Tom Wells, and the piece is called Jonesy. A teenage asthmatic, Jonesy is determined to take GCSE PE and prove himself one of the lads. Except rugby's a bit much for his asthma, so he ends up having to prove his manliness at netball instead.