Theatre review: Ravenscourt

Qualified NHS therapist Georgina Burns' first fully-staged play Ravenscourt opens at Hampstead Downstairs, and though there's the odd line of clunky dialogue for the most part it goes against my usual complaint about the venue's sets being more fully developed than the scripts (although Debbie Duru's set is a nicely economical use of the space.) It's set within the NHS' Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, a service both lauded as a world leader in its ambition for helping the nation's mental health, and critically underfunded and oversubscribed. Ravenscourt is a psychiatric facility; the day surgery is loomed over by an institution for those with the most serious mental illnesses, and occasionally therapy sessions are interrupted by the patients next door having an attack. Lydia (Lizzy Watts) is a comparatively young therapist but she does have some years of private practice under her belt by the time she decides to join the public sector.

Theatre review: Shook

Papatango award winners have tended towards some pretty bleak plays in the past, but while this year’s winning entry goes to some nasty places – both metaphorically and literally – its overwhelming tone is of a very dark comedy. Samuel Bailey’s Shook takes place in the small classroom of a young offenders’ institution in London, where the teenage inmates can’t study for the GCSEs their peers on the outside are taking except in special circumstances, but they are required to fill their time with vocational classes, as well as on other subjects that could help them in the outside world and stop them from returning in the future. For those inmates who are, or are about to be, teenage dads, Grace (Andrea Hall) is starting a class on how to care for the baby once they get released; Bailey’s play rarely takes place during the sessions themselves, but usually catches up with the three boys just before or after class.

Theatre review: Hangmen

The Royal Court ended its last season Downstairs with a play about hanging; it begins its autumn season with another one. But where debbie tucker green imagined a Britain where capital punishment is still in place, Martin McDonagh's Hangmen takes us to the day after its abolition. Most of the action takes place in a small Oldham pub run by Alice (Sally Rogers) and her husband Harry (David Morrissey.) But up until yesterday Harry's main job was as the country's second-best hangman, after the legendary Albert Pierrepoint. Any mention of Pierrepoint is taboo in this pub though, as instead of notoriety, Harry's job has gained him a macabre kind of celebrity, and he's been happy to capitalise on it for status. With the abolition of hanging in the news, a reporter from the local paper wants Harry's side of the story, and while he pretends to keep a dignified silence, he can't wait to hold court again.