Theatre review: Grief is the Thing With Feathers

Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a poetic novel about a man who’s unable to tell the difference between Grief and a duster suddenly left widowed and looking after two young sons; as well as dealing with the grief he also has to figure out how he’s going to organise his family’s life now that the person who did it all is gone, and once all the well-meaning visitors have left. A writer who’s meant to be starting a book on Ted Hughes’ Crow poetry, Hughes’ trickster bird becomes an imaginary friend to both him and his children, guiding them through the process in an erratic, sinister way. Enda Walsh adapts and directs the text for the stage as a vehicle for his regular collaborator Cillian Murphy, who plays the grieving Dad, as well as the Crow. Designer Jamie Vartan has provided a vast, mostly empty flat for Murphy to play out the story in, helped by a lot of projection work from Will Duke.

Theatre review: The White Devil

The Swanamaker launched with The Duchess of Malfi and now returns to the convoluted plots of John Webster for The White Devil - a play that's always failed to make much of a lasting impression on me, and although well-done I don't think Annie Ryan's production will change that too much. Joseph Timms plays Flamineo, who's so sick of not being rich he's willing to pimp out his married sister Vittoria (Kate Stanley-Brennan) to the wealthy Duke of Brachiano (Jamie Ballard.) But Brachiano becomes so enamoured of Vittoria he has her husband and his own wife murdered so they can be together. It backfires when Vittoria is accused of the murders and sent to a home for repentant prostitutes. While the family try to get their good name back, the dead Duchess' brother Francisco (Paul Bazely) plots revenge on Brachiano and all those who helped him.

Theatre review: Ballyturk

Enda Walsh and his regular collaborator Cillian Murphy reunite for Ballyturk, and while this time Murphy doesn't have to carry the whole show on his own like in Misterman, he must be using as much energy as if he was on stage alone again. Walsh is frequently compared to Samuel Beckett, and while the debt he owes has always been obvious, I've always found Walsh's work easier to like, displaying as it does a much better sense of the theatrical than Beckett's, which I find better on the page than on the stage. In Ballyturk the influence is more apparent than ever: Two men who may or may not be brothers, 1 (Murphy) and 2 (Mikel Murfi) are trapped in a windowless, doorless room and have been for longer than they can remember. Their waking hours are built around routines they must follow: Most important of these is that when the cuckoo clock chimes, they must take on the persona of a resident of the fictional village of Ballyturk, and act out their daily lives.

Theatre review: Khandan (Family)

Roxana Silbert recently took over at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and has started by bringing back a controversial figure from the theatre's past: Ten years ago Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play Behzti (Dishonour) was taken off after offending Sikhs. But Bhatti is also a writer for The Archers, and as her new play Khandan (Family) comes to London, it proves to be less explosive, and more gentle family drama. Jeeto (Sudha Bhuchar) has recently lost her husband, by all accounts a kind man but one with a drink problem. She now lives in a suburban house that's too big for her with her son Pal (Rez Kempton,) who's now running the shop his late father left him. Jeeto keeps up a pretense of disapproval that he married a white woman, but in reality she dotes on Liz (Lauren Crace,) who's as much part of the family as her own children.

Theatre review: Misterman

The original production of Disco Pigs helped make the names of both Enda Walsh and Cillian Murphy. The two have now teamed up again, Walsh (who also directs) writing solo show Misterman especially for Murphy. Thomas Magill is a disturbed young man, living with his disabled mother in a small Irish town. Since his father's death, they lost the shop that was their livelihood, and Mammy subsists on Jammie Dodgers while Thomas wanders around Inishfree, recording every conversation he has with the locals.