Theatre review: Octopolis

Seafood enthusiast Marek Horn follows up a play about tuna with a play about an octopus, and the people whose fascination with the molluscs becomes indistinguishable from love. In Octopolis George (Jemma Redgrave) is a scientist grieving her husband and research partner, with whom she developed theories about whether the notoriously solitary cephalopods might have a previously unknown social side. Since her husband's death, she's retreated into her living room with Frances, the octopus in a tank they were studying, and had made some potentially extraordinary discoveries on; she's not entirely unaware that she treats Frances as a way of still feeling connected to him. The house George lives in belongs to a University, and she's been too preoccupied to wonder why they've let her stay there since she stopped her teaching and research.

Theatre review: Mood Music

It takes a while for plays to get commissioned, written and programmed, so we haven’t seen a major theatre touch directly on the Kevin Spacey story yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Given the hamfisted way it dealt with the aftermath, is it particularly likely that theatre will be the Old Vic itself? In the meantime, Spacey’s successor Matthew Warchus has said there is a certain element of acknowledging the subject in his programming Mood Music, even if Joe Penhall’s new play touches more on the wider subject of powerful men’s treatment of younger women, than the specific one of a powerful man’s treatment of younger men. In any case even that’s arguably not what Mood Music’s really about: Up-and-coming singer Cat (Seána Kerslake) is thrilled to find out that industry legend Bernard (Ben Chaplin) will be producing her first album. He was, in fact, just looking for a female singer to take lead vocals on an album he’d written, but agrees to work on her songs instead.

Theatre review: Farewell to the Theatre

Melancholy is the overwhelming tone of Richard Nelson's new play Farewell to the Theatre, set among a group of English ex-pats in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1916. World War I rages but America hasn't joined yet and on a university campus, British experts are popular on the lecture circuit. Widow Dorothy (Jemma Redgrave) runs a guest house, and is in competition with her late husband's mistress over who can mourn him the longest. Her brother Henry (Louis Hilyer) is an English lecturer at the University, and neither of the siblings seem to be popular on campus. Beatrice (Tara Fitzgerald) is a married former actress having an affair with Charles (cute American actor William French in his professional stage debut,) the new president of the student drama society, while Jason Watkins' Frank is the cake-loving Dickens expert. The most recent arrival is Harley Granville-Barker (Ben Chaplin,) the actor, director, playwright and theorist whose ideas challenged theatrical tradition and who argued in favour of a National Theatre decades before it became a reality. Around this time in his life, Granville-Barker became disillusioned with theatre and eventually left it altogether; he also wrote a play called Farewell to the Theatre, from which this play gets its title, presumably in order to cause maximum confusion. It's also a bit misleading as it's not just Granville-Barker's crisis Nelson's play is concerned with.