Theatre review: It Walks Around The House At Night

Joe (George Naylor) is an out-of-work actor with a thing for posh boys, who's working in a bar when one of the regulars offers him a well-paid acting job - of sorts. David's nieces will be visiting the family's country pile for a week, and he's promised them an appearance from a resident ghost with a regular routine: It Walks Around The House At Night. One of the things about Tim Foley's ghost story that lets you know you're in (un)safe hands is the way he immediately wrong-foots the audience's mental image of what that title means - never setting foot inside the building, the ghost literally walks around the house, circling it in the surrounding dark woods. Joe is put up at a nearby lodge, asked to leave it only when dark falls and it's time to follow his assigned route through the trees.

Theatre review: KENREX

My online Show of the Year 2021 and even better live in 2022, nobody could accuse Cruise of lacking in ambition, but that's how its creator Jack Holden's follow-up makes it feel. Less obviously personal but with much more of an epic scope, KENREX takes Holden's monologue-with-songs format and applies it to a true crime documentary, one of those violent stories of isolated and twisted Americana. The isolated place in question is Skidmore, a Missouri town so small and remote it doesn't have a sheriff - if anyone makes a 911 call it'll take an hour for the police to turn up. This is something that local bully Ken Rex McElroy has taken advantage of throughout the 1970s, and his reign of terror has included violence, physical and sexual assault, arson, killing pets, theft of livestock, and general menace and intimidation of the town's population.

Theatre review: The Human Body

Plays can take a while to go through development and writing and get to production, often ending up with similar ideas making it to the stage at the same time. I wonder if it was the sound of people banging pots and pans every Thursday night four years ago that now gives us a batch of plays about the founding of the National Health Service? I didn't have any particular preconceptions about how Lucy Kirkwood would take on the subject, but it certainly wouldn’t have been something quite as camp as the Donald and Margot Warehouse's The Human Body turns out to be, filtering the birth of the NHS through Brief Encounter. It's 1948 and Dr Iris Elcock (Keeley Hawes) juggles being a GP with being a local Councillor, prospective MP in an upcoming by-election, and right hand woman to a Labour MP (Siobhán Redmond.) She's also a wife and mother, although despite her reassurances to the press that she's also the perfect housewife this is a role she's less of a natural in.

Theatre review: untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play

Arriving on the Young Vic stage in a blaze of chaos to match the flurry of asterisks in its title, Kimber Lee's untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is an Asian-American actress' equal parts angry, exhausted and exasperated look at the stereotypes around East Asian women that have persisted in Western art for at least a century, and one story in particular that won't go away. And although the version hiding in plain sight in the title is the one that's most notoriously caused controversy (especially on Broadway,) Lee's metatheatrical version of the story takes us back to the original, and walks us through Puccini's tragic opera Madama Butterfly. An ebullient narrator (Rochelle Rose) breathlessly takes us through the tale of Kim (Mei Mac,) a Japanese peasant girl whose mother (Lourdes Faberes) convinces her the way ahead is to seduce and marry an American sailor.

Theatre review: Midnight Movie

The Royal Court has long been at the forefront of trying to put the online world on stage – most recently Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner was an award-winning hit – and now Eve Leigh’s Midnight Movie plunges us into a sleepless night’s distracted browsing. We never meet the play’s protagonist, instead we follow Avatar 1 (Nadia Nadarajah) and Avatar 2 (Tom Penn) as they tell loosely connected stories, some funny, some mystical, many with a creepy edge. The starting point is a YouTube video of a woman in a hotel elevator appearing to fight an invisible monster; when she reached the top of the building she disappeared, only to be discovered months later, drowned in a water tank the laws of physics suggest she couldn’t have got into on her own. It’s a mystery that’s consumed a lot of people’s time, including the narrator’s, who’s obsessed with finding out what really happened; but investigating it online has pitfalls.

Theatre review: Vassa

Of course, Vassa isn’t the original title. The full title is Vassa Matter You? (Hey!) Gotta No Respec’?

The last time Mike Bartlett wrote for the Almeida he did it in the style of Chekhov, and he’s back with the Russians now, although this time it’s a direct adaptation. Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova turns out to be a play I’ve seen before, although either that adaptation or this one (or both) must be pretty loose, as the stories appear to have some massive differences. Bartlett’s is a claustrophobic family drama: Vassa (Siobhán Redmond) is the matriarch of a wealthy industrial family who rules with an iron fist and absolutely no velvet glove – the tone she’s established for the household is one of undisguised cruelty and personal attacks. It’s not just their business fortunes that are built on blackmail and corruption: Every relationship in the family seems to have come about because Vassa or her henchman Mikhail (Cyril Nri) has dirt on someone, right down to the servants they despise, but who they keep on because they have leverage that means they can treat them like shit.