Theatre review: Out of Season

Back to Hampstead and this week I'm Downstairs for its latest commission, Neil D'Souza's Out of Season and a midlife crisis comedy that gently takes in some themes you don't often see on stage. Thirty years ago, a trio of university friends went on a memorable holiday to Ibiza. Now, to celebrate his 50th birthday, Chris (Peter Bramhill) has asked that they recreate the trip - right down to the same room in the same hotel. Regardless of how many times he and Dev (D'Souza) say it's been done up since they were last there, the grubby walls and fading paint of Janet Bird's set suggest both the fact that they might have unrealistically romanticised their original holiday, and that they, like the room, have seen better days. Once in a band that came within sight of success only to miss their chance, manchild Chris still plays gigs in pubs, while Dev has become an academic and music historian, grumpily putting himself through a week he didn't really fancy for his old friend's sake.

Theatre review: The Height of the Storm

After premiering in Bath and Richmond, The Height of the Storm is the latest Florian Zeller play to make it to the West End, with director Jonathan Kent taking a risk on putting two notoriously difficult actors on stage together. The vague description in the publicity suggests another rather dark, sad journey into confusion and failing mental health, and while I’m generally a fan of cheerier things, where this writer is concerned I’d rather see him return to intimate tragedies than the so-so farces of his lighter side. Anne (Amanda Drew) and Elise (Anna Madeley) have gone to their parents’ home in the French countryside for the weekend; it soon becomes apparent that one of their parents has recently died, but Zeller deals in confusion and it’s hard to figure out which one, as both André (Jonathan Pryce) and Madeleine (Eileen Atkins) appear on stage regularly.

Theatre review: Torn

Nathaniel Martello-White's second play Torn has, like his first, a deliberately messy structure, although with much more successful results this time. Angel (Adelle Leonce) opens the show with the cryptic statement "it happened," words which she intends to open up old family wounds, but which most of the family aren't willing to listen to: As a child she accused her stepfather Steve (James Hillier) of abuse, something she then quickly retracted. Now she's decided to confront everyone with the fact that it was true all along, and she especially wants to deal with her mother 1st Twin (Indra Ové) - most of the characters don't get names beyond their position in the family - and the reasons she wanted Angel to keep quiet. In his first play Blackta, Martello-White focused a lot on gradations of skin tone, and if there's anything even remotely autobiographical about Torn it explains a lot about where this interest comes from.

Theatre review: The Armour

Last year a trio of Tennessee Williams Hotel Plays was staged at the Langham, a luxury hotel just off Oxford Circus. 2015 is the hotel's 150-year anniversary, and after the success of last year's show, they commissioned the theatre company Defibrillator to return and commemorate it, but this time with a piece written specifically for this space. After running a competition to find a suitable play, the company settled on a pitch by Australian playwright Ben Ellis, which would look back at certain events that are unique to the Langham's history. The result is The Armour, a three-act-play which like the Williams shorts takes audiences around the building at half-hour intervals, moving upwards through the hotel's floors, while moving backwards through its history. So we begin in the present day, in one of the private basement bars where pop star Jade (Hannah Spearmint From Off Of S Club) has locked herself away when she's meant to be performing an arena gig.

Theatre review: The Hotel Plays

Three Tennessee Williams vignettes come together to form an interesting promenade show from Defibrillator, a theatre company that's taken over three bedrooms and a function room of the Langham Hotel in central London to create The Hotel Plays. Small audience groups are led up and down stairs by an usher, and the stories linked by appearances from porter Charlie (Linden Walcott-Burton) as we witness intimate scenes from fracturing lives. The Langham is a pretty swanky hotel, but for Defibrillator's purposes its rooms represent places that probably aren't quite as posh, and more likely to witness the kind of nefarious business we see in the short plays. Like the long-running affair in The Pink Bedroom, directed by Anthony Banks, where a Man (Gyuri Sarossy) arrives expecting another no-strings night with his mistress. But the Woman (Helen George) is starting to want something a bit more from the relationship - something like respect.

Theatre review: Hard Feelings

Unexpected pitfalls of putting on a play: If, as the audience enters, a TV on the set is showing Airplane!, even on mute, the audience may just end up watching and enjoying it, and be a bit resentful of the actors when they turn up and expect us to watch them instead. Well, this audience member might. The film is playing on video, rather a luxury I imagine as the year is 1981 and we are in the Brixton house owned by Isabella Laughland's Viv - or by her parents at any rate, living in America and letting their daughter live there to look after their investment. Viv shares the place with a few of her fellow Oxford graduates, although which of them exactly is meant to be a rent-paying resident at any given time is a bit vague, and subject to frequent change at her whim, or should she choose to take offense at something they say.