Theatre review: The Two Character Play

If it's not common knowledge quite how long and prolific Tennessee Williams' writing career actually was, it's not just a case of not all his Southern melodramas being up there with A Streetcar Named Desire and the other hits; it's also that later in his career he experimented with other styles wildly different from what he's best-known for. As Hampstead Theatre resumes its aborted 2020 anniversary season of shows that premiered there over its long history of new writing, we get to Williams channeling Beckett (worrying,) Ionesco and Pirandello (better) in 1967's The Two Character Play. It does share with earlier work like The Glass Menagerie a personal inspiration: Williams' relationship with his troubled sister Rose, whose mental health problems and the brutal way they were treated give those plays a tragic undertone. But here not only does it seem like we meet a Rose avatar after the lobotomy, that could be the state of mind the whole play takes place in.

Theatre review: [BLANK]

The Donald and Margot Warehouse’s association with women’s prisons continues into Michael Longhurst’s regime as Clean Break, the company that works with women who’ve been through the Criminal Justice System in some capacity, celebrates its 40th anniversary with a kind of kaleidoscope of their experiences. Alice Birch’s [BLANK] is described as a “theatrical provocation” which, as written, is too long to be staged – the idea is that a director is challenged to choose from 100 scenes with unnamed characters, to construct a performance from it and in many cases decide on the characters’ genders and relationships. Maria Aberg is the director given the task, and she opts for an all-female cast, giving all the characters the first name (and in some cases last name) of their actor, and weaving a story consisting of several short, sometimes connected scenes, with one much longer one as the centrepiece.

Theatre review: The End of History...

Ten years ago Jack Thorne set an entire play in the wee small hours of the 2nd May 1997, and with his latest play's opening scene taking place about six months after that date it's clear he's not yet done interrogating what the hope and optimism of Tony Blair's first victory actually ever amounted to. Blair is much more of a background noise than a central theme in The End of History..., a family drama spanning twenty years that often has the feel of a sitcom that's gone unusually dark. Sal (Future Dame Lesley Sharp) and David (David Morrissey) are a kind of embarrassing sitcom mum and dad (right down to the clichéd trope of the mum who's a terrible cook,) with the main source of embarrassment being their commitment to their left-wing beliefs and causes, their enthusiasm for which has never dulled.

Theatre review: Pinter One - Press Conference / Precisely / The New World Order / Mountain Language / American Football / The Pres and an Officer / Death / One for the Road / Ashes to Ashes

Preview disclaimer: Pinter One invites the critics in next week.

Pinter One is the collective name being given to a nonuple bill of short writing by Harold Pinter that launches Pinter at the Pinter, the Jamie Lloyd Company's ambitious project to stage all of Harold Pinter's one-act plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre. I'm going to be using the word "Pinter" a lot over the next few months, is what I'm saying. Originally announced as a quadruple bill, other poems and sketches have been gradually getting added so that the evening's full title should now be Press Conference / Precisely / The New World Order / Mountain Language / American Football / The Pres and an Officer / Death / One for the Road / Ashes to Ashes. Which may explain why they renamed it Pinter One. Lloyd directs the first eight playlets and poems in a selection linked by an overtly political theme.

Theatre review: The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams' most overtly autobiographical play is probably my favourite, which is just as well as it's also the one I've seen most often - John Tiffany's production of The Glass Menagerie is my fourth, and comes to London after acclaimed runs in New York and Edinburgh. Tom (Michael Esper) is the narrator, unreliable by his own admission, of a memory from his youth in St Louis living with his mother and sister, his father having long sonce absconded. His sister Laura (Kate O'Flynn) has a slight limp, and in her teens was ill with pleurisy for a long time, and both have been magnified in her mind - she became shy to the point that it's now a crippling mental illness. At the play's opening, their mother Amanda (Cherry Jones) discovers that Laura has been lying about going to a typing course for the last few weeks - she had a panic attack after a couple of days and dropped out.

Theatre review: The Trial

In the past I've left a Richard Jones production at the Young Vic at the interval, but for his new show he's found a cunning way to prevent that: The Trial doesn't have an interval. Nick Gill adapts Franz Kafka's surreal nightmare of bureaucracy in which, after a drunken night out, Josef K (Rory Kinnear) wakes up on the morning of his birthday to find a group of officials at his flat - at least he assumes they're officials, they have no documentation to show him. But they do tell him he has to prepare to go on trial, although neither he nor the court must know what he's being accused of. Over the next year he is required to attend hearings at unspecified times and places, complete endless paperwork and make deals with shady bureaucrats. Initially dismissing the accusations as a joke, he becomes increasingly paranoid as everyone he meets seems to know about the trial and take it very seriously.

Theatre review: A Taste of Honey

A seminal kitchen sink play, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey gets revived by Bijan Sheibani at the Lyttelton. At the tail end of the 1950s Helen (Lesley Sharp) arrives at the small, grubby Salford flat she's rented, accompanied by her teenage daughter Josephine (Kate O'Flynn.) It's far from the first time they've moved; the alcoholic Helen's past is full of failed love affairs and every time one sours she's moved to a new town, dragging her daughter with her. But this time Helen's found a wealthy younger man she won't let slip through her fingers - when the spivvy Peter (Dean Lennox Kelly) proposes, she's soon married and moved in with him, leaving Jo to deal with a marriage proposal of her own: She knows sailor Jimmie (Eric Kofi Abrefa) is only really after one thing but she doesn't care. Soon he's back at sea, and she's alone and pregnant.

Theatre review: The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas

Following what amounted to a teaser season, Vicky Featherstone officially takes over at the Royal Court by bringing Dennis Kelly's work to the main stage for the first time. Kelly might have brought us Matilda, Orphans and Pulling but he's also the man responsible for causing the gods to weep, so this really could have gone either way. The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas follows the mild-mannered title character (Tom Brooke) through a life of doing the right thing, always asking if this is a sign of goodness or cowardice. This question is answered when Gorge meets the fearsome A (Pippa Haywood,) a ruthless business leader who sees in him the potential to join her amoral elite. Redefining his life according to three golden rules of lying and single-mindedness, Gorge soon outshines his mentor to become an über-capitalist monster, willing to skilfully manipulate everyone who comes near him.

Theatre review: Port

It's been almost half an hour since Simon Stephens wrote a new play and the National Theatre are clearly worried audiences might be suffering withdrawal symptoms. So they've dug into his archives and Marianne Elliott (who directed this play's premiere in 2002 and most recently collaborated with Stephens on The Curious Incident) directs Port in the Lyttelton. Over two-and-a-half hours Stephens makes the case for his home town of Stockport as the most depressing place on earth, a concrete tomb in Lizzie Clachan's design, where we first meet Racheal (Kate O'Flynn) in 1988, aged 11. In a drunken fit of violence her father Jonathan (Jack Deam) has locked himself into the flat so Racheal's mother Christine (Liz White) has taken her children to the car, where they sit all night waiting for a sign that Jonathan might let them back into their home.

Theatre review: The Sound of Heavy Rain

The casts of both Lungs and One Day When We Were Young come together for the final play in Paines Plough's Roundabout season at Shoreditch Town Hall, The Sound of Heavy Rain. Where the other two plays are intimate relationship stories, Penelope Skinner's contribution is a drily witty pastiche, relocating the hard-boiled detective tropes of film noir from LA to the rain-soaked streets of Soho. Dabrowski (Andrew Sheridan) is a PI who spends his nights drinking to get over being dumped, when the dowdy Maggie (Maia Alexander) arrives at his office with a case for him. Her best friend and flatmate has disappeared, and the detective sets off to find the glamorous cabaret singer Foxie O'Hara. But the further he gets into the case, the more Dabrowski starts to suspect that Foxie may never have even been real.

Theatre review: Lungs

Back to Paines Plough's pop-up theatre in Shoreditch for the second of three short plays, Lungs by Duncan Macmillan. We were in the popular blue seats this time, and I was solely responsible for our seating arrangements because Vanessa, it turns out, is afraid of buttons ("What the hell is that?" she thundered at the three bowls of different-coloured buttons on the box office desk.) Like One Day When We Were Young, Lungs is a two-hander that condenses two people's relationship over a number of years into a one-act play, although here most of the focus is on one period of their lives. A young couple (Kate O'Flynn and Alistair Cope) are shopping in IKEA one day when Man suddenly brings up the question of whether they should have a baby. Woman is completely thrown by this and so begin lengthy discussions about the pros and cons of starting a family, and apart from how the pair of them will be affected, she also keeps coming back to the social responsibility of bringing a child into an already overpopulated world.