Theatre review:Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

It's billed as an adaptation of a novel, but Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky actually turns out to be three of them, a trilogy of interconnected stories about working class Londoners in the 1920s. It means Simon Reade's adaptation of them into a single two-hour show can be called brave at the very least, possibly foolhardy - it does explain something about the rather stilted evening we end up with, always hovering on the edge of something charming but never really getting there. At the centre of the story is a pub, The Midnight Bell, and two of the bar staff: Bob (Jordan Scowen) has been carefully building up his savings, but his inability to stand back when someone he cares about is in need means he's lately become prone to sudden acts of generosity, handing out cash to people like his longtime friend and coworker Ella (Rosalind Lailey.)

Theatre review: Oedipus (Wyndham's)

The same plays or themes do sometimes crop up several times in quick succession - particular stories will strike multiple people as topical after all, and theatres can be too far into their own production by the time they find out someone else has had the same idea - but earlier this year two competing productions of Sophocles' Oedipus were announced within minutes of each other, which has to be some kind of record. At least they're not quite overlapping, and first motherfucker out of the gates is Mark Strong, who plays the tragic king for adaptor-director Robert Icke. It's a return to Greek Tragedy after Icke's epic Oresteia, but while there's a lot that's powerful about the performances, the overall show didn't live up to its predecessor for me. We're in a modern political story, in a state that isn't named, but the Greek writing on the screens suggests it's a version of the original's Thebes.