Theatre review: The Garden of Words

Adapting Japanese animation for the stage seems to be the new big trend, and as well as the Studio Ghibli juggernauts that also means smaller-scale anime like Makoto Shinkai's The Garden of Words, a low-key, dreamlike coming-of-age drama that follows the growing friendship between a teacher and pupil - although their Shinjuku school is evidently big enough that they don't, at first, realise that it links them. Takao (Hiroki Berrecloth) is a friendless 15-year-old who dreams of being a shoemaker when he grows up, while Yukari (Aki Nakagawa) is a literature teacher who's been caught up in a scandal when a student falsely accused her of inappropriate behaviour. Whenever it rains they both skip off school and escape to a temple garden, where she reads poetry and he sketches designs for women's shoes.

Theatre review: My Night With Reg

If established theatres were hit hard by lockdown, how bad must it have been for new venues that hadn't had a chance to build up an audience base or cash reserves? The much-trumpeted, shiny new Boulevard Theatre seems, according to its website, to have permanently shuttered after barely getting a chance to open, but across the river at Battersea Power Station Paul Taylor-Mills' Turbine Theatre is back up and running, reopening with a fairly safe bet: Despite its underlying bleakness, Kevin Elyot's My Night With Reg has been consistently popular with audiences: Both its 1990s debut at the Royal Court and the 2010s revival at the Donmar Warehouse got West End transfers. The only question is, was seven years (it feels a lot less) since last seeing the play too soon for me to revisit it?