Theatre review: Reykjavik

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I caught Reykjavik's final preview performance before they invite the press in.

Add Richard Bean to the ever-growing list of playwrights who really just want to write a ghost story: It's fair to say I've had mixed reactions to his plays, but while the writer's biggest hits have been with comedy, the mournful, haunted Reykjavik is probably the best of his plays that I've seen. Set in 1976, with the Cod Wars (Iceland demanding, and invariably getting, an increasingly large area of exclusivity for fishing its waters) nearing their end, the fishing industry that makes up a huge proportion of Hull's economy looks under serious threat. But for Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth,) whose company owns several boats, there's a more immediate problem: One of his trawlers has sunk in the freezing waters off Iceland, and all but four of the crew are dead. It's something all the trawlermen know is a possibility, and the city has traditions for dealing with it.

Theatre review: Antony & Cleopatra(Shakespeare's Globe)

One of my A'Level English Shakespeares, and not one I've ever loved, Antony & Cleopatra had my favourite-ever production at the Globe. The latest revival's publicity makes a point of the fact that it's ten years since it was last seen there, but that wasn't the original intention: It was first announced that Deaf actress and familiar face at the venue Nadia Nadarajah would play the Queen of Egypt in 2020, in what was also meant to be that year's Michelle Terry-starrer in an unannounced role. I guess the Artistic Director might have been eyeing up Antony, but my bet would have been Cleopatra's chief lady in waiting Charmian, allowing her to translate from British Sign Language to English and back. If my guess was right then the four-year delay caused by lockdown made for a different high concept for Blanche McIntyre's production, which still stars Nadarajah as Cleopatra, but has her joined by a number of other D/deaf performers for a fully bilingual production.

Theatre review: Trouble in Mind

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I seem to be having a run of shows I could only fit in before they officially open to the press; this was the penultimate preview.

A play that made me spend a lot of the evening wondering if I'd misread how old it was, Alice Childress' Trouble in Mind was first staged off-Broadway in 1955; which makes it ahead of its time, to say the very least. Wiletta Mayer (Tanya Moodie) has made a successful career as an actress, admittedly mostly in all-black revues and a succession of bit-part "mammy" roles on screen. Now she's preparing to go back to Broadway for a ground-breaking new drama that will make a powerful statement about racism, and mobilise its comfortable white audience into empathy. It's just a shame that the play-within-a-play, written and directed by white men, is terrible, and full of as many offensive stereotypes as any number of overtly racist works. But as she tells newcomer John (Daniel Adeosun) when rehearsals begin, there's a certain repertoire of polite nods, smiles and giggles black actors have to offer up to white creatives if they're going to feel comfortable around them and continue giving them work.

Theatre review: The Sugar Syndrome

How do you evoke nostalgia for the fairly recent past? At the moment the sound of a dial-up modem does the trick very effectively, which is handy when the play is a revival of Lucy Prebble's first-produced play The Sugar Syndrome. That sound opening the show clues us in not just to its 2003 setting, but also to what must have been one of the first major plays to look at relationships formed online and, to start with at least, how you might not be getting quite what you were expecting. 17-year-old Dani (Jessica Rhodes) has been using chatrooms to meet people in real life, but some awkward fumbling (how does the props person make stage-jizz anyway, and how do they credit it on their CV?) with the smitten, awkward Lewis (Ali Barouti) turns out not to be exciting enough for her, and her next meeting is more unconventional and potentially dangerous: Pretending to be an 11-year-old boy, she befriends convicted paedophile Tim (John Hollingworth) and arranges to meet him IRL.

Theatre review: Multitudes

Much as it suits the narratives of particular papers and politicians to pretend otherwise, British Muslims aren't a homogenous group with a single mindset but are, as the title of John Hollingworth's play has it, Multitudes, all with their own experiences and priorities. Hollingworth attempts - with variable success - to put as many of these points of view, as well as some that oppose them, into a single Bradford family. The famously multicultural city becomes the unlikely venue for the Conservative Party Conference, at the same time as military action in Syria is being mooted. A moderate Muslim and longstanding local councillor with Parliamentary ambitions, Kash (Navin Chowdhry) is due to make an optimistic speech at the conference. He's a widower with a teenage daughter, and a white girlfriend, Natalie (Clare Calbraith,) who's got a surprise in store for him.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good toured last year, but that hasn't put original director Max Stafford-Clark off returning to it with his Out of Joint company to mark its 25th anniversary. The play has become an A'level set text, and accordingly the St James Theatre - where the new production ends a national tour - was fuller than I'm used to seeing it, largely with school parties. From the snippets of conversation I overheard, Our Country's Good inspires a lot of strong feeling in the teenagers who study it, and they seemed completely satisfied by a production that's been cast with a number of actors who aren't exactly household names, but will be familiar to theatre aficionados. Most of them have to play multiple roles in Wertenbaker's sometimes overtly Brechtian telling of the true-ish story of the early days of Australia, when some of the recently-arrived prisoners performed George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer.