Theatre review: Fatherland

Frantic Assembly’s verbatim piece Fatherland is the brainchild of director Scott Graham, composer Karl Hyde and playwright Simon Stephens, who come from Corby, Kidderminster and Stockport respectively. Their idea was to return to those home towns and conduct a dozen interviews with local men about fatherhood – most of them fathers themselves, all of them at least having something to say about their own fathers. The resulting play puts their thoughts and memories on stage in a text put together by Stephens, sometimes set to music by Hyde, and brought to typically physical life by Graham, but the actual interview process and creation of the play ends up being as much if not more of what it’s about: As well as casting actors to play their subjects, the trio put versions of themselves on stage too, with Nyasha Hatendi’s Simon and Declan Bennett’s Scott leading the interviews while Mark Arends’ Karl absent-mindedly records everything in the background.

Theatre review: Adding Machine

Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt's Adding Machine, based on a 1923 piece of expressionism and getting its UK premiere from Josh Seymour at the Finborough, follows Mr Zero (Joseph Alessi,) who works in a large store, adding up figures in the back room. He's had the same job for 25 years, the same amount of time he's been married to Mrs Zero (Kate Milner-Evans,) who mainly screams abuse at him through the medium of opera. Zero believes that his 25-year anniversary at work will surely be marked with a promotion to the front store, but in fact his boss (James Dinsmore) cheerfully informs him he's being fired and replaced with an adding machine. Zero's reaction to being discarded is violent, and he soon finds himself on Death Row alongside Shrdlu (Edd Campbell Bird,) a highly religious murderer who's looking forward to getting tortured in Hell for his crimes.

Theatre review: Monster Raving Loony

You do tend to get a little something extra when you're in the audience for a James Graham play; The Man had its receipts, Privacy came with airline safety-style instruction cards, while his latest, Monster Raving Loony, comes with a whole goody bag on every seat, containing party hat, bingo card, raffle ticket and a gift - mine had a party blower but I spotted comedy mustaches and plastic Groucho Marx glasses elsewhere*. This being Graham, the sort of party this is is a political party, but not the kind with actual hopes of winning an election - in fact one rule of the Monster Raving Loony Party was that anyone who actually won their seat would be expelled from the party. This is the story of Screaming Lord Sutch, born in 1940 as David Sutch (Samuel James) in Harrow, North London, growing up in a cluttered house with his widowed mother while the nearby public school churned out future ministers.