Theatre review: The Southbury Child

Continuing an unprecedented run of two whole not-terrible original plays at the Bridge Theatre, Stephen Beresford's The Southbury Child comes to London after premiering in Chichester. Nicholas Hytner directs regular collaborator Alex Jennings for the first time at his own venue, as vicar David Highland, who's served the parish of a small Devon town for so many years his whole family call it home. At one point the town was a fishing and industrial community, but is now starkly divided on economic lines - the scenic riverside houses are second homes for the wealthy, while in the more derelict parts of town the locals scrape by at call centres, as cleaners or on benefits. David holds a position somewhere between the two classes, who do have one thing in common: Most of them never go anywhere near his church except for christenings, weddings and funerals.

Theatre review: Peggy For You

As we go into 2022 Hampstead Theatre finally gets to finish its 2020 season reviving notable works that premiered there over its first six decades. After the bleakness of the last offering we get something lighter in Peggy For You, Alan Plater's affectionate - but not uncritical - tribute to legendary agent Peggy Ramsay. She was the top name for representing playwrights, but despite her fearsome reputation she would have seen any success her clients achieved as largely incidental; and over the course of the day we meet three clients at very different stages of their careers. But first we meet Peggy (Tamsin Greig) crashing on the sofa of her office, having spent the night bailing out one of her most illustrious clients after he ran amok at the French Embassy. Arriving far too early for his appointment is Simon (Josh Finan,) a young writer who sent her a script.

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: The Merry Wives of Windsor(RSC / RST & Barbican)

I'd been fully expecting the RSC to announce that Antony Sher would return to the role of Sir John Falstaff "by" "popular" "demand" when the complete works got round to The Merry Wives of Windsor, but apparently King Lear marked the First Lady's retirement from Shakespeare so instead it's another RSC stalwart who gets a crack at one of the most popular characters, albeit in his least popular appearance. David Troughton plays Falstaff in a play rumoured, somewhat dubiously, to have been commissioned by Elizabeth I herself when she wanted to see more of the breakout star of the Henry IV plays. It's this legend Fiona Laird's production takes as its starting-point, with a Terry Gilliam-style animation of the Queen demanding Shakespeare get out of bed and write her a spin-off in two weeks (a timescale that, let's face it, isn't rendered entirely implausible by much of what follows.)

Theatre review: Romeo and Juliet(RSC / RST, Barbican and tour)

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of Romeo and Juliet, but it's also no secret that I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise - Rupert Goold's production was my favourite show of 2010, an accolade I gave it largely because making me like the play is a feat in itself. Since then no version I've seen has given me reason to think that was anything other than an outlier. I wonder how many others see Goold's as such a landmark, because since then the RSC has steered clear of one of Shakespeare's most popular plays: For comparison, Michael Boyd's Antony and Cleopatra opened around the same time, and the company has already revisited that twice since then. Deputy Artistic Director Erica Whyman is the brave soul tasked with finally taking on the star-crossed lovers again, and while this won't be another production to entirely defy my expectations, she's taken a suitably bold approach to the play, and one that attempts to solve many of the problems I have with it in performance.