Theatre review:The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights

The long-running annual Papatango playwrighting prize has been particularly peripatetic in the last couple of years, and I've pretty much continued to follow the winners around London's theatres, even as I still feel it tends, more often than not, to reward plays filled with abject misery. It can still prove worth keeping up with though, and while Hannah Doran's The Meat Kings Exclamation Mark Open Brackets Inc Full Stop Close Brackets of Brooklyn Heights goes to some very dark places, it does so with the energy and urgency of a thriller. Paula (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune) runs the New York butcher's shop established by her Italian-American family a century earlier, but is facing financial difficulties they've never faced before thanks to a Whole Foods down the road cutting into her upscale clientèle. But she's still determined to provide the high quality service the family have always delivered.

Theatre review: Otherland

Chris Bush's Otherland opens with an otherwise happy couple divorcing over one insurmountable issue; the rest of the two and a half hours follows each of them through the huge physical and emotional changes that come next. Jo (Jade Anouka) has always known her husband identified as a woman but had no intention of transitioning, and it never caused any problems. But after ten years together Harry (Fizz Sinclair) has decided it's time to be her real self, and while bisexual Jo is primarily attracted to women, it turns out the woman Harry has become isn't one of them. They separate and largely lose contact, and while Jo meets a new partner in Gabby (Amanda Wilkin,) Harry has to navigate both the legal obstacles to having her gender recognised, and the personal milestones with her family: Her initially supportive-seeming mother Elaine (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune) is actually constantly deadnaming her and dismissing her transition.

Theatre review: Just For One Day

I've got to say I found the idea of Just For One Day a bit baffling, and having now seen John O'Farrell's jukebox musical setting the story behind the scenes of Live Aid to songs from the setlist, I still feel a bit vague about what exactly's going on at the Old Vic at the moment. I want to say the framing device is a young woman in the present day, Jemma (Naomi Katiyo) wanting to know more about the event for, I guess, a history project, but the use of multiple narrators muddles this. She gets help from Suzanne (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune,) who was at Wembley for the concert, as well as Bob Geldof (Craige Els) himself, who for some reason is available to give the inside scoop. So in 1984 Bob sees a news report about a famine in Ethiopia and is horrified - by the suffering, the general indifference and lack of aid from wealthier nations, and from the fact that while he knows others will be upset by the story as well, it'll soon be forgotten by most people when the news cycle moves on.

Theatre review: [BLANK]

The Donald and Margot Warehouse’s association with women’s prisons continues into Michael Longhurst’s regime as Clean Break, the company that works with women who’ve been through the Criminal Justice System in some capacity, celebrates its 40th anniversary with a kind of kaleidoscope of their experiences. Alice Birch’s [BLANK] is described as a “theatrical provocation” which, as written, is too long to be staged – the idea is that a director is challenged to choose from 100 scenes with unnamed characters, to construct a performance from it and in many cases decide on the characters’ genders and relationships. Maria Aberg is the director given the task, and she opts for an all-female cast, giving all the characters the first name (and in some cases last name) of their actor, and weaving a story consisting of several short, sometimes connected scenes, with one much longer one as the centrepiece.

Theatre review: Utility

Emily Schwend's Utility concludes another successful season at the Orange Tree, albeit one that's felt more quietly consistent than full of explosive hits. This, too, is in the same vein, an American kitchen sink drama about a woman just about keeping her head above water. The play starts with Amber (Robyn Addison) tentatively agreeing to let her husband Chris (Robert Lonsdale) move back in with her and their kids after a separation. It's implied, if never explicitly stated, that there was another woman, but in any case this doesn't seem to be what she's worried about: He's charming and well-meaning, but Chris is also unreliable and can barely seem to manage a couple of shifts at work every week, so Amber feels he'll end up being just another mouth to feed as she works two jobs. This week she's also got to worry about preparing an eighth birthday party for her daughter.

Theatre review: Queers Part 1

It hasn't been marked quite as ubiquitously on stage as the centenary of the First World War, the 4th centenary of Shakespeare's death or even the King James Bible were, but theatres are now starting to step up the events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. The Old Vic has paired up with the BBC, whose Queer Britain season includes the upcoming Queers on BBC4, eight monologues curated by Mark Gatiss giving snapshots of gay life before and after decriminalisation, to give each one of the short plays a one-off live performance. About half of the performers from the TV version have been able to reprise their roles, with the rest recast, and Gatiss shares directing duties with Joe Murphy on Part 1 as well as writing the first of the four stories in this first collection.

Theatre review: Henry IV (Donmar Warehouse)

Following 2012's Julius Caesar, which saw the inmates of a women's prison perform the play but find some of its themes too close to home, for the Donmar's 2014 Shakespeare production they've returned to Phyllida Lloyd's concept to see the prisoners try again. Lloyd has now said she enviasages these all-female Shakeaspeares as a trilogy; the third play hasn't been revealed yet but the middle installment is a merging of the Henry IV plays. Although in practice it's a shortened version of Part 1, with Part 2 represented by its two most iconic scenes, plus a third that mops up some plot points. So this is largely the story of Prince Hal (Clare Dunne,) his life of petty crime and carousing with drunken knight Falstaff (Ashley McGuire,) and the first major indication that he's more of a formidable figure than he chooses to present: An uprising against his father, led by the charismatic Hotspur (Jade Anouka,) is crushed partly due to Hal's unexpected transformation into a fighting machine.

Theatre review: Candide (Menier Chocolate Factory)

Who'd have thought I'd be seeing a second show called Candide within a matter of months? What with Mark Ravenhill's "response" at the RSC, and the research that Ravenhill admitted was necessary before seeing it, I'm starting to feel very familiar with Voltaire's satire on optimism, despite never having read it. Raised on the philosophies of Pangloss, who teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds, therefore everything that happens must be for the best, Candide travels the world seeking his lost love Cunegonde. Beset by catastrophe after catastrophe, he blandly ascribes them all to the mysterious but necessary machinations of a benevolent god. The version of the story now being revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory is Leonard Bernstein's operetta, which has gone through a number of different versions over the years - the one used here is a 1988 text first staged by Scottish Opera, with book by Hugh Wheeler and lyrics by 70% of the earth's population.

Theatre review: 9 to 5

I don't know how many times I watched 9 to 5, the Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton movie about disgruntled office workers when I was a kid, but it must have been a lot, I have very fond memories of it. Parton's stage musical version with a book by Patricia Resnick had a brief run on Broadway and now debuts in the UK in a touring production, which this week turns up in Richmond. A huge clock dominates Kenneth Foy's set, and a video projection of Parton herself appears in the clock face intermittently to act as narrator, looking a bit like the Teletubbies face in the Sun if it had a couple of moons orbiting it. She introduces Violet (Jackie Clune,) Doralee (Amy Lennox) and newcomer Judy (very good understudy Gemma McLean,) whose working lives are made a nightmare by sexist, embezzling CEO Franklyn Hart (Mark Moraghan.)