Theatre review: Habeas Corpus

The Menier Chocolate Factory tends to feel like London's most conservative, if not most Conservative theatre, and as such some of its safe programming choices for a coffin-adjacent audience base can translate to disinterring creaky old farces that should have stayed buried in the 20th century. But if the farce in question is an early Alan Bennett play (early, I mean he was forty but these things are relative,) and it's directed by the prolific but usually reliable Patrick Marber, I'm prone to think it might be worth checking out anyway. Unfortunately both writer and director seem to have made a colossal error of judgement where Habeas Corpus is concerned: With a plot set in a doctor's surgery and an approach that tries to dig up the darker side of farce's obsession with sex, the play feels like it could be paying homage to Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw*. Except that play's genuinely sexy, shocking and funny.

Theatre review: Experience

Dave Florez' short play Experience is about a subject I may or may not have heard of before - at one point in the play a Daily Mail story objects to it and the headline sounds familiar, but then the Daily Mail objects to pretty much everything except fascism so I could just be confusing it with something else. Sexual Surrogacy is a therapy technique originally designed to help individuals and couples with sexual problems, but it's been suggested as a way of helping rehabilitate criminals as well. Helen (Kirsty Besterman) is a therapist trying to get Dan (Christian Cooke,) who's been in a criminal psychiatric facility since he was 16, to talk to her, but he's institutionalised and unable to deal with other humans. She enlists her top sexual surrogate Amy (Charlotte Lucas) to start with something as basic as a handshake and move on to sex until he's ready to face the outside world.

Theatre review: The Precariat

Fin (Scott Chambers) is a teenager preparing to do his A'levels, and expected to do well as he's highly intelligent and articulate, hard-working and comfortably placed somewhere in the middle of the social strata at school. But if his prospects look good academically, his home life begs to disagree, as he belongs to a new class Chris Dunkley's new play christens The Precariat: A generation growing up into an uncertain future, precariously balanced and at the whim of the global markets. Living with his unemployed, depressive mother Bethan (Kirsty Besterman,) Fin's part-time job at a fried chicken shop makes up a disproportionate part of the family income. And ever since the 2011 riots, his younger brother has got increasingly involved with the local drug dealing gang, the unseen Leo becoming a constant concern for his older brother, whose tragedy may be that he's all too acutely aware of his own limited prospects.

Theatre review: The School for Scandal

I really didn't plan for this to be a year when I went to a lot of new theatres (I have too many to keep up with already) but the newly-opened Park Theatre's main house is hosting a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal directed by Jessica Swale. And as Swale's productions of Restoration comedy are a perennial favourite of mine, with last year's The Busy Body making my annual Top Ten, I couldn't let this slip through the net. The Surface brothers have very different reputations: Joseph (Tom Berish) has carefully cultivated a good name for himself and is well thought-of in society, while his brother Charles (Harry Kerr) is a drunkard, rumoured to be trying to seduce the newly-married Lady Teazle (Kirsty Besterman.) When their wealthy benefactor Sir Oliver (Timothy Speyer) returns from India, he has a suspicion that things are very different beneath the surface, and sets about tricking his nephews into revealing their true selves.