Theatre review: Dr Angelus

"Ah well, you did your best and it wasnae very good... And that's a fair epitaph for most of us." Obscure mid-20th century plays really are delivering the best lines at the moment, this one courtesy of the Finborough's current alternate show, James Bridie's Dr Angelus. Set in 1920 and inspired by a true crime story, it follows recently-qualified Dr George Johnson (Alex Bhat,) who's moved to Glasgow to take a too-good-to-be-true partnership with the eccentric Dr Angelus (David Rintoul.) His gratitude and respect for the older man let him overlook some suspicious behaviour - like the fact that his heavily-insured mother-in-law only gets sicker the more Angelus treats her, and when she finally dies he insists Johnson sign the death certificate. George keeps his silence even when Angelus' wife (Vivien Heilbron) starts exhibiting the same symptoms her mother did.

Theatre review: Roaring Trade

When Steve Thompson's Roaring Trade premiered in 2009, it was nominally set a couple of years earlier, as it lifted the lid on some of the dodgy-but-legal trading practices that had caused the banking crash. In Alan Cohen's revival at the Park, today's Evening Standard is clearly displayed at one point, because this is a play about characters, and an industry, that doesn't learn lessons (unless it's the lesson that they can keep doing what they like because they'll get bailed out if it goes wrong.) Donny (Nick Moran) is the archetypal barrow-boy trader; he and his colleague Jess (Lesley Harcourt) spend their days buying and selling stock for millions of pounds at a time; their preferred technique includes bullying and manipulating their co-workers into making mistakes that will work out to their own benefit.