Theatre review: Machinal

The Almeida’s current season of female playwrights now looks back to 1928 for a play whose expressionist style places it very firmly in that time, but whose script often feels almost unnervingly up-to-date. In Machinal, Sophie Treadwell despairs at the world treating all people like part of a machine, but there’s no question it’s women’s role in that machine that’s the particular target. Initially known only as Miss A, later revealed to be called Helen, Emily Berrington plays a young woman who works as a stenographer in a New York office where she doesn’t fit in, largely due to being the only one who openly admits she feels like she’s wasting her life there. Not that this deters the company vice-president, Jones (Jonathan Livingstone,) who proposes to her. Helen flinches at his touch, but she knows marriage is the expected next step in her life, and a wealthy husband would get her out of her 9-5 job, so she accepts.

Theatre review: Choir Boy

The cross-dressing black American playwright Tarrell Alvin McCraney first made his name with a well-received trilogy of plays. Unfortunately I didn't see those, and only caught up with his work for his last two plays - both of which were pretty universally panned. So would his return to the Royal Court also prove a return to form, and help me see (although I didn't hate the other two plays, I wasn't blown away either) what the fuss was about?

Choir Boy takes place in an all-male, all-black US prep school, where the Headmaster (Gary McDonald) tries to juggle the tensions of a hormone-filled building with keeping the alumni happy and their all-important donations coming in. And this is a school board that's easily offended: As the play begins they're demanding he punish Pharus (Dominic Smith) because he briefly looked behind him while singing the school song at commencement.