Theatre review: Groan Ups

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Groan Ups is having an extended preview period and invites the official reviewers in next week.

Mischief Theatre's success story has gone beyond fairytale to downright ridiculous as they're now a worldwide brand, who recently took out an ad promoting their current and upcoming London shows, and needed an entire Evening Standard wraparound to fit them all in. Having been a fan of their work since The Play That Goes Wrong was a one-acter testing the waters at Trafalgar Studio 2 I've been dreading them losing their magic touch and falling flat on their faces (in the bad way.) A year-long residency for the core company at the Vaudeville could have been the over-ambitious move that proved too much, but the opening show certainly suggests they're nowhere near running out of steam yet. As usual Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields are the writers, but Groan Ups gets its laughs from a more traditional farce structure than their earlier hits, as well as suggesting they do have a more thoughtful side when they want to.

Theatre review: The Sweet Science of Bruising

I don't think we can really call it a 2018 meme when it's so obviously a timely and appropriate response to a conversation going on everywhere, and particularly in the arts, but there's certainly been an explosion this year of shows by and about women: Particularly ones like Emilia, Sylvia and, just ending its run in the space next door to this one, Wasted, that illuminate the present through the women who've fought against society's expectations in the past. That fight is literal in Joy Wilkinson's The Sweet Science of Bruising: Her subject is Victorian women's boxing, her heroines four women from very different backgrounds who all find themselves fighting for a newly-invented world championship title when London boxing promoter Professor Charlie Sharp (Bruce Alexander) travels to Manchester in search of new talent, and discovers that promising fighter Paul Stokes (James Baxter) has a girlfriend, Polly (Fiona Skinner,) who's every bit as good if not more so.