Theatre review: Botticelli in the Fire

Roxana Silbert must be planning on giving her new theatre’s regulars a bit of a fright if her second main-stage show is anything to go by – you don’t know what silence sounds like until you’ve heard a Hampstead audience’s reaction to a comedy cunnilingus scene. Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli is best known for his “Birth of Venus” but his private life seems to have been full of mystery and contradictions: There are reports of him having been promiscuously gay as well as, in later life, having been a devoted follower of homophobic, fire-and-brimstone preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Both his sexuality and the extent of his religious conversion are disputed, however, and for his fictionalised biography Botticelli in the Fire Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill takes both stories to be true; in what Botticelli himself (Dickie Beau) introduces as the story of his downfall, we see what might have led him from poster child for Renaissance excess to allegedly burning many of his own paintings in the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities.

Theatre review: Late Company

The Shaun-Hastings are setting places for a dinner party with people they don't really know. Michael (Todd Boyce) is a conservative politician recently elected to the Canadian Parliament, Debora (Lucy Robinson) a "campaign wife" and one-time artist (a steel cock-and-balls she sculpted is the first thing the audience sees in Zahra Mansouri's design when coming into the Finborough.) They've looked into their guests and are a bit worried that while they themselves are clearly wealthy, Tamara (Lisa Stevenson) and Bill (Alex Lowe) might be the wrong kind of rich, and Debora thinks they're probably a bit vulgar. The reason for this awkward comedy of manners is a lot darker than the surface makes it look. Michael and Debora had a teenage son, Joel, who killed himself some months earlier. Bill and Tamara's son Curtis (David Leopold) was a ringleader among those who bullied him to his death.