Theatre review: Ghosts

Ghosts is probably my favourite Ibsen play and one of the most frequently-produced; both things may or may not be connected to it being comparatively short. In fact while watching Kwame Owusu's production at Jermyn Street I did think maybe I could do with a break from it for a while as I'm a bit too familiar with every beat of the story to be surprised by any of it, although as with Shakespeare there's always the chance to see what particular angle each production will take. In this case the overwhelming feeling is one of sickness, of an atmosphere as steeped in disease as a Southern Rail service at rush hour. And not just because this is The Congenital Syphilis Play. Oswald (Joe Pitts) has returned from art school in Paris to his family's remote Norwegian home for the tenth anniversary of his father's death, to be marked with the opening of an orphanage in his honour.

Theatre review: The Wind and the Rain

If the Finborough Theatre still exists in 90 years' time (still somehow based in an inaccessible room that people are constantly trying to evict them from, above a pub that's due to have gone bankrupt another 18 times by then,) I imagine they'll be staging 2:22 A Ghost Story, with a blurb marvelling at the fact that it played half the theatres in the West End with a rotating cast of random women with big Instagram followings. That (minus the Instagram part) seems to have been the story of The Wind and the Rain in 1933, with Merton Hodge's semi-autobiographical play about his student days also fitting in a successful Broadway run before vanishing without trace. In other words it's a textbook Finborough rediscovery, and one that, while amiable enough, left me trying to pick apart exactly what could have made it so popular.

Theatre review: Spring Awakening

I'm starting 2022 as I'd like it to go on, not only with a show that got cancelled at the end of 2021, but one which proves an absolutely storming opener to the year: Steven Sater (book and lyrics) and Duncan Sheik's (music) Spring Awakening is the musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind's radical 19th century play about teenagers' repressed sexualities and the devastating consequences of their parents keeping the realities of the world from them. The pop-rock songs are an anachronistic jolt from the 1890s German setting of the dialogue scenes, but it's surprising how much of the plot - that encompasses teenage pregnancy, abortion, suicide and same-sex relationships - comes straight from Wedekind. Friends since childhood, the teenagers have been separated into single-sex schools and discouraged from meeting each other.