Theatre review: Twelfth Night (RSC / RST)

The RSC's apparent reverse-Globe scheduling policy of rarer Shakespeare plays in the summer and the most famous ones in winter continues with Twelfth Night as the holiday show. Prasanna Puwanarajah's production even embraces the play's seasonal title with a few Christmas songs and decorations - all fairly subtle though, this story does after all feature a high-profile Puritan, and they were famously not big fans of Christmas. In fact I was meant to see this closer to the season itself but with the train service between That London and Stratford-upon-Avon being nonexistent for most of this month I had to reschedule to the final matinée: I'd rather not have to publish a review after the show's closed but needs must when Chiltern Railways exists. Opening not with the big storm but with Gwyneth Keyworth's Viola spluttering out of the water, the sense of understatement extends from the Christmas trimmings to many elements of the play.

Theatre review: Peggy For You

As we go into 2022 Hampstead Theatre finally gets to finish its 2020 season reviving notable works that premiered there over its first six decades. After the bleakness of the last offering we get something lighter in Peggy For You, Alan Plater's affectionate - but not uncritical - tribute to legendary agent Peggy Ramsay. She was the top name for representing playwrights, but despite her fearsome reputation she would have seen any success her clients achieved as largely incidental; and over the course of the day we meet three clients at very different stages of their careers. But first we meet Peggy (Tamsin Greig) crashing on the sofa of her office, having spent the night bailing out one of her most illustrious clients after he ran amok at the French Embassy. Arriving far too early for his appointment is Simon (Josh Finan,) a young writer who sent her a script.

Theatre review: Measure for Measure(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I can't easily tell from the Globe website when the press night is due, but as I had a member of the creative team sitting next to me making notes I'm guessing we're still in the preview period for this one.

I'm going to get a big grumble out of the way first this time, because I have a lot of good things to say about Blanche McIntyre's production of Measure for Measure, and don't want them to be overshadowed by something that's a regular irritation. But you know, if it's a regular irritation at one particular theatre that's because they just keep doing it, namely underselling how long a show is. I know I often say I like short shows, so can understand why saying a show isn't that long is good marketing, but if it's not true the advertised running time is useless at best, a lie at worst. I use the info to figure out when and how is the best way to get home, especially when, like tonight, a Tube strike makes that more complicated. So as seems to happen every time I go to the Globe now, I spent the last half-hour wondering if the play would overrun by 15 minutes (can still catch my train) or 20 (1 hour 15 minute gap until the next one for some reason, not getting home until after midnight) instead of paying attention to the show*.

Theatre review: Botticelli in the Fire

Roxana Silbert must be planning on giving her new theatre’s regulars a bit of a fright if her second main-stage show is anything to go by – you don’t know what silence sounds like until you’ve heard a Hampstead audience’s reaction to a comedy cunnilingus scene. Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli is best known for his “Birth of Venus” but his private life seems to have been full of mystery and contradictions: There are reports of him having been promiscuously gay as well as, in later life, having been a devoted follower of homophobic, fire-and-brimstone preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Both his sexuality and the extent of his religious conversion are disputed, however, and for his fictionalised biography Botticelli in the Fire Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill takes both stories to be true; in what Botticelli himself (Dickie Beau) introduces as the story of his downfall, we see what might have led him from poster child for Renaissance excess to allegedly burning many of his own paintings in the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities.

Theatre review: Venice Preserved

I've seen Venice Preserved once before, but as that particular production was an incoherent car crash that was 50% sales presentation for a property development and 50% people desperately shouting "immersive!" at you while asking for money for four hours, it's probably easiest all round to just treat Thomas Otway's Restoration thriller as completely new to me. Prasanna Puwanarajah directs a mercifully coherent production, although how much sense the plot itself makes remains up for debate. Jaffeir (Michael Grady-Hall) is recruited by his best friend Pierre (Stephen Fewell) to join a bloody rebellion against the corrupt ruling class of Venice; both swear loyalty to the cause, but each also has a personal vendetta against some member of the senate which is the real clincher in wanting to bring them down. In Jaffeir's case, it's his senator father-in-law Priuli (Les Dennis,) who disapproved of the marriage and went out of his way to punish him for it.

Theatre review: Twilight Song

Kevin Elyot’s final play is called, appropriately enough, Twilight Song, and it’s a short, distinctly odd one that left me with the suspicion he hadn’t quite finished working on it when he died. Alternating between the 1960s and the present day in the same suburban London villa, it was bought, largely thanks to a cash gift from a wealthy uncle, by Isabella (Bryony Hannah) and her meek new husband Basil (Paul Higgins.) Partly due to events that unfold in the play, the improvements they planned to make to it never happened and by the time their son Barry (also Higgins) is in his fifties, the place seems to be falling apart and he’s thinking of selling it. Estate agent Skinner (Adam Garcia) is optimistic that it can fetch a good price regardless, but he may just be buttering him up because he supplements his income with a side-line in prostitution, and he’s spotted a likely customer in the lonely and repressed Barry.

Theatre review: The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare's Globe)

This Globe season has taken us  to Troy, Egypt and Jerusalem, so it's in keeping that their final Shakespeare production of the year has also been given a Middle-Eastern flavour. Although Blanche McIntyre hasn't let the Arabian Nights setting of her Comedy of Errors stop her from throwing in all kinds of more recent references from Quidditch to Looney Tunes. This early comedy may be Shakespeare's shortest play but 2 hours 25 minutes still feels pleasingly brisk, especially as McIntyre has added a lengthy silent comedy opening, introducing us to Dromio of Ephesus (Jamie Wilkes) as he clambers perilously around the stage. It sets up this Dromio as the slapstick twin, while Dromio of Syracuse (Brodie Ross) will prove to be the one with more word-play and witticisms in his arsenal.

Theatre review: Moth

Only a couple of years on from getting a new building the Bush has already started experimenting with a second auditorium. They've staged a couple of shows there before but the first one I've had the chance to get to is Declan Greene's Moth, a transfer from the HighTide Festival. The Attic turns out to be a tiny space, low-ceilinged, as hot as the Finborough used to be pre air-con and, in this in-the-round arrangement, seating what can't have been much more than 40 people. At least this intimate, claustrophobic setup is apt for the play, which takes us into the world of a very disturbed teenager. Sebastian (Jordan Mifsúd) is a grubby, bullied schoolboy with only one friend - emo girl Claryssa (Stacey Gregg.) When even her friendship seems in question, Sebastian looks to a higher power and a more apocalyptic narrative for his life.

Theatre review: Straight

There's a definite kinky theme developing to this week's theatregoing (how traumatic for me, I'm sure you're all thinking, given the famously prim and proper nature of my reviews.) After last night's definitely-not-gay shenanigans, tonight a play that takes a look at what it means to be Straight, by taking the very notion to its extreme. DC Moore has shown an ability to write not only powerful but quite varied plays with the likes of The Empire, Honest and The Swan (varied, but if they can be set in/actually take place in a pub, so much the better it seems.) This time he's taken as his inspiration a fairly recent film, Lynn Shelton's Humpday, to look at the platonic relationship between straight male friends, and in the process use it as a prism to look at men and women's relationships as well.