Theatre review: Babies

The Other Palace has managed to combine its remit to discover new British musicals with the high school musicals that have been its bread and butter in recent years: Martha Geelan (book) and Jack Godfrey's (music & lyrics) Babies isn't even an adaptation of an existing property, although its premise has been a mainstay of teen TV drama since even I was a teenager: Back then it would most likely have been an egg that each of a class full of kids would have been given to look after as if it was a baby; here Year 11 are delivered a shipment of hi-tech Japanese dolls that cry like real infants and need feeding and care. The class have to look after them for a week while juggling all their usual schoolwork, a cautionary project meant to put them off becoming single teen parents for real, as the entirety of the year above them seem to have done.

Theatre review: Here

Southwark Playhouse's current home on Newington Causeway has been rechristened Southwark Playhouse Borough, to differentiate it from the new venue down the road that it's going to be coexisting with for the next couple of years. It's also once again become the host of the annual Papatango playwrighting prize after it moved to the Bush last year - although it's now in the Large space after several years in the Little. I've often thought Papatango tends to favour fairly downbeat plays, though they generally come with some spark of inspiration that makes them worth catching. Well 2022's winner, Clive Judd's kitchen sink play Here, definitely provides the downbeat part, but unfortunately I personally failed to find in it the redeeming features to make its hefty running time worthwhile. The kitchen is in the West Midlands home of Monica (Lucy Benjamin,) which she inherited when her father died two years earlier, and which still has the 1980s decor he left behind.

Theatre review: Armadillo

It's hardly a fresh observation to say Americans have a uniquely odd, unhealthy relationship with guns; so it says something about Sarah Kosar's new play that she's found a new and disturbing twist on the subject. Armadillo follows three people in their late twenties who've grown up in families where firearms were seen as essential, to the point of fetishisation. For newly-married Sam (Michelle Fox) and John (Mark Quartley) the fetish has literally become sexual - they use loaded guns as foreplay, until an accident six months into their marriage leaves Sam with a gunshot wound in her arm. Realising that it's not just dangerous but an addiction, John comes up with a regime for them to give up having guns in the house. For a while they seem to be managing it, except for the fact that gunplay was so tied up in their love life that Sam can't have sex without it.

Theatre review: The Passing of the Third Floor Back

As you might be able to infer from my photo, I’m quite partial to a cheeseburger. Although it would presumably be pretty synonymous with an instant heart attack, I can’t say I haven’t been tempted by Byron’s Christmas Fromagemas burger this year, featuring four different types of cheese as well as a jug of cheese sauce to pour over your cheese in case your cheese wasn’t cheesy enough. If all this indulgence seems like a particularly 21st century type of excess, I would have to point out that 110 years ago West End audiences made a hit of Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back, a play featuring toxic levels of cheese they presumably couldn’t get enough of. Mrs Sharpe (Anna Mottram) runs a London boarding house for what she considers to be a better class of clientele, but everyone there is miserable and trying to get one over on each other.