Theatre review: Black Comedy

1960s British farces rarely get revived these days, generally because they're built on attitudes and situations that haven't exactly aged well (with the exception of What The Butler Saw, which gets away with it because how horrible those attitudes and situations are is basically the whole point.) But back when I was in school our drama club did a scene from Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy so - about as long after that performance as it was from the play's 1965 debut - I gave the Orange Tree's revival a chance in what I had originally planned to be a weekend of Shaffer, pairing it with his more famous Equus. This is a much less violent affair, other than in the slapstick sense: The high concept is that the play begins in what the audience sees as complete darkness, but in which the characters can see perfectly well.

Theatre review: The Tempest(Jamie Lloyd Company / Theatre Royal Drury Lane)

Apparently when John Gielgud ended his run as Prospero at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1957, he foretold that Shakespeare would never again be performed at the venue, which would become a home for big musicals only. No doubt any suggestion of snobbery was fully intended, but it's also probably fair to say that a vast stage and 2000+ seat auditorium might be easier to fill with a big spectacle than with a production of a play that comes around every couple of years in London alone. But the theatre is now owned by His Exalted Brittanic Excellency, The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB, who has enlisted Jamie Lloyd to end the 67-year Shakespeare drought at the venue with a starry mini-season inspired by the noblest of all intentions: Proving that a man who died a quarter of a century ago was wrong about that thing he said that one time.

Theatre review: The Hot Wing King

The Pulitzer drama prize continues to try and get me back on side, with its 2021 award going to a writer I've liked for a long time, Katori Hall. The Hot Wing King's take on the hot-button topic of masculinity, and particularly black masculinity, is a refreshingly different one as it centres the action around a found family of gay men: After five years in a long-distance relationship Cordell (Kadiff Kirwan) moved from St Louis to Memphis to be with boyfriend Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Rhoden,) leaving everything behind including a wife and two children. The play takes place over the weekend of the annual Hot Wing Contest, a cook-out Cordell has come close to winning but never quite achieved before, and as ever they're joined by their friends, the flamboyant Isom (Olisa Odele) and more reserved, sports-loving Big Charles (Jason Barnett,) to help them put together the recipes Cordell has perfected over the last year.

Stage-to-screen review: Hamlet (Bristol Old Vic / BBC)

It's been a couple of years since I last saw a full production of Hamlet, and with a while yet before the next major one is due (now watch as another gets announced the second after I click Publish,) it seemed as good a time as any to check out the version the BBC offered up recently as part of their First Folio season. This was John Haidar's 2022 production at the Bristol Old Vic, one that had caught my eye for casting real-life husband and wife Finbar Lynch and Niamh Cusack as the king and queen of Denmark. Haidar didn't cast Calam Lynch in the lead to complete the family set, but instead Billy Howle plays Hamlet, the prince of Denmark who's moping quietly at the start of the play after his father's sudden death. Alex Eales' set is slickly black and I want to call Natalie Pryce's costumes modern-dress, except the characters' tech is very Nineties: Hamlet loves soliloquising into his dictaphone, and "The Mousetrap" is interrupted when Polonius' pager goes off.

Theatre review: The Seagull

Jamie Lloyd's latest West End season was meant to run at the Playhouse, where its first show, Cyrano de Bergerac, played in early 2020. The follow-up production of Chekhov's The Seagull was of course a casualty of Covid, and now that it's returned its original home has been taken over by the Kit Kat Club. So instead Lloyd has regrouped at the Pinter, home of his previous season, for a production that continues to go for the same stripped-back aesthetic, but with a very different result than Cyrano's rap battle fireworks. Lloyd uses Anya Reiss' 2012 version of the play, which means the setting is the Isle of Man in the present day, where frustrated young writer Konstantin (Daniel Monks) lives at his uncle Sorin's (Robert Glenister) house by a lake. If their lives are usually quiet and uneventful that's not what we see, because all four of the play's acts take place during visits from Sorin's sister, Konstantin's mother.

Theatre review: The Visit, or,The Old Lady Comes To Call

After Angels in America was a transatlantic success for the National Theatre twice over, it's no surprise if they're keen to bring Tony Kushner back to their stages; the Olivier this time, and instead of an original story it's for an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's obscure 1956 play The Visit, or, The Old Lady Comes To Call; but one thing that definitely hasn't changed is Kushner's determination that, once he's got the audience through the doors, he's going to keep them there as long as humanly possible. And while it doesn't fly quite as far into the realms of magic realism as his most famous work, this play - essentially an extended fable on debt of many different kinds - is full of oddities. It takes place over a few days in 1955 in the town of Slurry, New York State, once a manufacturing hub but now collapsing, its various businesses sold up to unseen buyers and liquidated years ago, and now reduced to selling the church bells for scrap metal.

Theatre review: Instructions for Correct Assembly

Thomas Eccleshare isn’t a playwright afraid of a high concept, or of asking his creatives for the impossible, whether it’s nature fighting back against urbanisation in a very literal way, or a Mediaeval poem turned into a live comic book. Instructions for Correct Assembly, his first play for the Royal Court’s main stage, is no different, taking the idea of the IKEA flat-pack and wondering what we could be building out of it next. Harry (Mark Bonnar) and Max’s (Jane Horrocks) son Nick (Brian Vernel) died some months ago after years of drug addiction. But the couple have found a project to help them move on with their lives, and are excited to assemble their new son Jån (also Vernel,) who’s been ordered from a generic model (“white and polite”) but can be programmed to suit their own specifications. Through a series of comic scenes they iron out the imperfections, but as time goes on they feel the need to programme some grey areas back in.

Theatre review: Saint George and the Dragon

To Rory Mullarkey falls the dubious honour of giving the Olivier stage its best piece of new writing this year; a bar set so low the only challenge it could provide is in a limbo contest. Straight after I saw Albion, another play's title gives away the fact that it'll touch on English identity in the face of Brexit, as Mullarkey gives us his centuries-spanning, epic twist on Saint George and the Dragon. John Heffernan plays failed dragon-slayer George, who returns to the country of his birth only to find that one of the creatures he's been running from has taken up residence there too, turning it into a dark place in constant fear. Charles (Gawn Grainger) begs the knight to slay the beast, but it's only when he sees and instantly falls for Charles' daughter Elsa (Amaka Okafor) - who happens to be the Dragon's next meal - that he agrees to challenge him.

Theatre review: The Victorian in the Wall

Will Adamsdale's The Victorian in the Wall is at the Royal Court Upstairs in a limbo period between Artistic Directors (although presumably someone had to OK its run?) and has for me an element of déjà vu as I saw a work-in-progress version of the show 18 months ago, as part of the Rough Cuts programme. Guy (Adamsdale) is a writer - or at least, he wrote an award-winning short story in the late '90s. What he actually does best is procrastinate, at the moment over a CBeebies script he's meant to be writing (he's stumped on the characters' motivation.) His long-term girlfriend Fi (Melanie Wilson) has a much more grown-up job (so much so that Guy has no idea what she actually does.) She's also the one who's organised the building works due to take place as the couple gentrify their Victorian East London flat.