Theatre review: Equus

30 years after graduating I still feel compelled to see the four plays I worked on in my directing module at university, whenever I hear of one being revived somewhere I can get to. Now on the fourth production of it I've seen, Equus easily has the top spot of most regularly revived. I'd originally planned to make a Peter Shaffer-themed weekend of it last week, but when the Sunday performance at the Menier was cancelled I had to reschedule - I guess two Saturdays in a row is still a themed season of a kind. Last week Black Comedy was very much a throwback to the 1960s, and Equus is very much rooted in the 1970s both in its references and in the countercultural R.D. Laing psychiatric theories that inspired it, so why does it seem to hold up better? Lindsay Posner's production certainly keeps the original setting, from the otherwise long-forgotten advertising jingles to the child psychiatrist smoking in sessions with his patient.

Theatre review: The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea isn't the easiest watch in the Terence Rattigan canon but it's considered among his great works; that, and Tamsin Greig in the lead role, were reasons enough to revisit a play steeped in despair and redemption in its first return to London since the late Helen McCrory led it at the National a decade ago. The play opens with a suicide attempt: Hester (Greig) is found on the floor of her room in a dilapidated boarding house, unconscious but still alive next to the hissing gas fire. In an early example of how the play juggles the banal with the profound, her life was saved when the gas ran out because she forgot to top up the meter. Landlady Mrs Elton (Selina Cadell) and neighbours Mr & Mrs Welch (Preston Nyman and Lisa Ambalavanar) will get her help, but their meddling will also bring everyone from Hester's complicated life right back to her.

Theatre review: A View From The Bridge

It's ten years since Ivo van Hove's production of A View From The Bridge not only made a star of the Belgian director in London and New York, but also tangibly influenced the way a lot of theatre has been approached since then. It feels a lot more recent than a decade, but then all that influence is probably part of that (along with the fact that I have seen it a bit more recently than that, as a streamed recording during lockdown.) So in some respects it probably is time for someone to revisit Arthur Miller's domestic tragedy as a whole new generation can see it with fresh eyes; but for many of us it'll be slightly odd to see a production that keeps the original details and trappings of post-War New York, where Italian-American families live under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and work - when they can find work - loading and unloading ships on the docks.

Theatre review: The Lie

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Official critics are invited this Wednesday.

The critics may well get to see one of the leads performing most of the play script-in-hand as Alexander Hanson, a late replacement for an ill James Dreyfus, was at today’s performance only off-book for two of the play’s scenes. This is for the latest from Florian Zeller, who seems to like his plays to come in pairs: The Truth is followed up by The Lie, another comedy of infidelity, which even has its characters share the names of the earlier play’s quartet (although they don’t actually appear to be the same characters, unless they’re alternate-universe versions.) And as The Truth was about lies, then The Lie is about truths, and passing off the truth as a lie. If that all seems a bit convoluted and circular you should see the actual dialogue, which at one point I thought had actually turned into a real-life version of the famous “loop” scene from The Play That Goes Wrong.

Theatre review: The Truth

Prolific French writer Florian Zeller is fast becoming ubiquitous on the London stage; after the pairing of The Father and The Mother took a dark and moving look at crumbling minds and crumbling relationships, a change of tack with a much lighter look at rocky marriages in The Truth (which also has a companion play, and I imagine we'll see The Lie here too soon enough.) For the last six months Michel (Alexander Hanson) has been having an affair with Alice (Frances O'Connor,) the wife of his best friend Paul (Robert Portal.) They've been meeting in the afternoons in a hotel room, but things get derailed as it seems Paul and Michel's wife Laurence (Tanya Franks) might have cottoned on to the affair. Alice thinks they should just confess all to their spouses but Michel thinks they can brazenly style it out - presumably not realising just how bad a liar he is.

Theatre review: The End of Longing

My sister, who saw him on The One Show the other day, says that Matthew Perry comes across as very witty and spontaneous in interviews. So it's interesting that he chose not to utilise any of that in his playwrighting debut. The star of Six White Complainers has based The End of Longing on his own struggles with alcoholism, but says his lead character in the play is based neither on him nor his sitcom character. I can't vouch for the former but as for the latter, Perry himself stars as a sarcastic New Yorker with a very small circle of friends; let's call him Bandler Ching. Bandler meets a pair of female friends in a bar, and starts a relationship with Stephanie (Jennifer Mudge.) Her friend Stevie (Christina Cole) turns out to be shagging Bandler's best friend Joseph (Lloyd Owen,) in one of many such coincidences - there may be the bright lights of a cityscape behind Anna Fleischle's set, but the characters keep bumping into one of the other three people they know.

Theatre review: Dinner with Saddam

Children's author Anthony Horowitz has a fondness for playing in other people's sandpits - he's written Sherlock Holmes novels and recently gave James Bond a sassy gay friend - and now he turns playwright. The subject is his enduring anger over Tony Blair and George W Bush's military action in Iraq, and he's attempted to confront it with shocking comedy - well, "shocking" is definitely a word you could use. Dinner with Saddam is an attempt at a farce based on the true fact that Saddam Hussein would sometimes appear unannounced at the home of one of his subjects; ostensibly to show solidarity with his people, though it didn't hurt that it meant the US army didn't know where he was so couldn't blow him up. In 2003 Ahmed (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and his wife Samira (Shobu Kapoor) are bickering over the lack of fresh food and water, the broken toilet and their daughter's impending marriage, when it's announced Saddam (Steven Berkoff) will be joining them for dinner.

Theatre review: Communicating Doors

Ever since we saw the Old Vic's production of The Norman Conquests in 2008, Vanessa has been an Alan Ayckbourn fan, and as you can pretty much put money on there being at least one production of his plays a year, it's ended up reliably being my birthday present to her. But while she's continued to love the plays, for me there's been seriously diminishing returns. So maybe my expectations were low, but it turns out Communicating Doors is the Ayckbourn I've enjoyed the most since that first trip. Perhaps it's the fact that, while still recognisably Ayckbourn in many ways, the play has quite a different feel to it to the domestic comedies I've been used to in the last few years. It's a very English take on a time travel adventure as, in the year 2020, dominatrix Phoebe (Rachel Tucker) travels through a riot-torn London, past where Big Ben used to be, to meet a wealthy old client in a five-star hotel.

Theatre review: Hay Fever

It was only three years ago - and in his eponymous theatre - that Hay Fever was last on St Martin's Lane, but already Noël Coward's partner-swapping comedy of manners is back. This time it's down the road at the Duke of York's, in a production that comes to London from Bath with most of its original cast, plus Edward Killingback (Yeah!) Them Motherfuckers Don't Know How To Act (Yeah!) as Sandy. It's a June weekend at the country home of the desperately affected Bliss family: David (Simon Shepherd) is a successful novelist whose work keeps them all in luxury, but the alpha personality is his wife Judith (Felicity Kendal,) a retired actress considering returning to the stage because she hasn't had quite enough letters demanding it. Everyone claims to be looking forward to a quiet weekend as they've each invited someone to the house - four new admirers the Blisses can spend the weekend toying and flirting with.

Theatre review: Harvey

"There's a bit of Harvey in all of us!" says the poster tagline, which is patently untrue because not everybody eats rabbit. Mary Chase's play won the Pulitzer Prize, proving that at one time you could do so with a play that wasn't about racism in suburbia - admittedly that time was 1944, and it's hard not to go into the Theatre Royal Haymarket for Harvey with a sense of trepidation. Especially since one of the press quotes chosen to sell the show essentially says Peter McKintosh's set looks quite expensive. The play has unquestionably dated, but it's hard to entirely dislike: Veta (Maureen Lipman) is hoping to marry off her daughter Myrtle May (Ingrid Oliver,) but she's worried suitors will be put off by the family eccentric, who controls all the money: Elwood (James Dreyfus) is friendly and generous, but he's also accompanied most of the time by a pooka, a Celtic mischief spirit who takes the form of a six-foot white rabbit called Harvey, whom only Elwood can see. Veta has finally had enough of her brother's delusion, and tries to get him sectioned in Dr Chumley's (David Bamber) asylum.

Theatre review: Speed-the-Plow

Where the commercial theatre is concerned, the clue is in the name: The primary motivation is profit, it's just that some projects make this more obvious than others. It's clearly the reason for the current show at the Playhouse - Mamet's Speed-the-Plow was only at the Old Vic a few years ago, so I doubt anyone was crying out to see it again just yet, but it does feature a fairly high-profile, but not actually all that big, role for a young actress. Enter Lindsay Lohan, the former child star turned walking soap opera, and you've got a show that should generate plenty of column inches as she predictably goes off the rails. As it turns out Lohan, who joins Nigel Lindsay in Lindsay Posner's production, seems to have been getting on with the job; actually tonight it was the third star, Richard Schiff, possibly being punished for not being called Lindsay, who had lost his voice. So the role of Bobby was played by understudy Adam Morris - although let's call him Lindsay, so he doesn't feel left out.

Theatre review: Other Desert Cities

A few years ago the Old Vic was reconfigured in the round for a production of The Norman Conquests that proved a big hit, followed by some other shows memorable for... other reasons. This configuration has been brought back for Dame Kev's final season in charge of the venue, beginning with the UK premiere of a hit American play, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities. The setting is Palm Springs on Christmas Eve 2003, with 9/11 and the Iraq War still feeling very new. But a war that still haunts the family of Republican politician Lyman Wyeth (Peter Egan, from the 1980s) is Vietnam: Their oldest son became notorious in the '70s when, at the age of 20, he bombed an army recruitment office in protest at the war, accidentally killing a man, and subsequently committed suicide.

Theatre review: Relatively Speaking

For an Officially Accredited National Treasure^TM, there's something very divisive about Alan Ayckbourn. Most of the other theatre bloggers I know seem to hate his work with a fiery vengeance but the newspaper reviewers and much of the public can't get enough - hence the West End revivals that keep coming at a rate of one or two a year. I've never had that strong a response to him either way but since my friend Vanessa is firmly in the "love" camp these revivals are must-sees for us. Lindsay Posner's production of Relatively Speaking toured last year but has now settled into a London run at Wyndham's with the same cast of Felicity Kendal, Jonathan Coy, Max Bennett and Kara Tointon. Kept in the 1960s when the play was written, the production's opening almost suggests a parody of the period's kitchen sink dramas, but soon opens out into something much cosier.

Theatre review: The Winslow Boy

Terence Rattigan's centenary celebrations in 2011 included a number of revivals of his plays, resulting in a renewed interest in his work, which continues to make regular returns to the stage a couple of years after the anniversary. It's no wonder; the last decade's reevaluation of his work has revealed one of the great playwrights of the 20th century, unfairly allowed to slide into obscurity after the Angry Young Men put him out of fashion in the 1960s. I've really enjoyed the work of his I've seen so far so was really looking forward to the latest revival, and one of his most famous works: After joining in the birthday party with Cause Célèbre two years ago, the Old Vic takes on The Winslow Boy, Lindsay Posner directing a cast led by Henry Goodman as the father taking on the government in a fight to clear his son's name.

Theatre review: The Turn of the Screw

Theatre rarely attempts horror, but when it does it can be a profitable experiment, as The Woman in Black and Ghost Stories proved. Latest to give it a go is the Almeida, teaming up with horror movie legends Hammer, who are launching a live performance arm. Rebecca Lenkiewicz adapts The Turn of the Screw, Henry James' endlessly popular ghost story, more commonly seen on stage as an opera.

An unnamed Governess (Anna Madeley) is hired by the distant Mr Sackville (Orlando Wells) to care for his orphaned niece and nephew, on the understanding that she never contacts him should anything go wrong. Which, of course, it immediately does - she forms an instant affection for Miles and Flora, but is just as quickly convinced they are in grave supernatural danger from the ghosts of their former governess and her lover.

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya (Vaudeville Theatre)

Vanya has spent his life looking after his late sister's estate, taking a pittance for himself and sending all the profits to support his brother-in-law: An illustrious professor, Serebryakov has been a source of pride to the whole family. But when Serebryakov remarries and retires, he decides to move himself and his new young wife Yelena to the country estate that's been supporting him all these years. As Uncle Vanya opens, the title character (Ken Stott) has started to see that the professor (Paul "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?" Freeman) is a hack who's contributed nothing to his field and will leave no legacy. Chekhov's play looks at what happens when Vanya begins to realise that if the man he's sacrificed his life's work to is a nonentity, his own life's been a waste. Meanwhile the beautiful but listless Yelena (Anna Friel, like I just got home, Anna Friel) enraptures both Vanya and the local doctor.

Theatre review: Abigail's Party

Set designers must love plays from the 1970s, as they always dive in with gusto to throw as much orange-and-brown tat as possible onto the stage. Living rooms of the period were, in my memory, crammed full of bizarre knick-knacks, but is that accurate or just the fact that when we see living rooms decorated for the period, every cliché of the decade appears in them because that's funnier? Mike Britton is the designer in the 70s toybox this time, and if there's a lot of stuff in the front room of Laurence and Beverley, much of it is in fact right there in Mike Leigh's script in the suburban passive-aggressive classic, Abigail's Party. Following huge success with Noises Off, Lindsay Posner now directs a darker, more acidic comedy, but with similarly strong results.

Theatre review: Noises Off

Michael Frayn's double-sided farce Noises Off is regularly described as the funniest play of all time, which has to be a bit of a poison chalice: It has a lot to live up to and needs a spectacularly well-timed cast to actually do so. Fortunately Lindsay Posner at the Old Vic has assembled just this kind of cast and choreographed them to perfection.

The play-within-a-play is called Nothing On, and our first experience of it is at the tech rehearsal, doubling as a dress rehearsal, as the first night's hours away. Celia Imrie's Dotty is bankrolling the production and also playing housekeeper Mrs Clackett¹. Like most of the under-rehearsed cast, she's having trouble remembering her lines and the complex moves that largely involve plates of sardines. Among the cast is Selsdon (Karl Johnson,) drunk and frequently disappearing, so exhausted stage manager Tim (Paul Ready) is constantly called on to stand in for him. While the actors all struggle through their tech, the real audience gets an idea of how Nothing On is meant to run. After the interval we join them backstage at a matinee midway through the run, where the onstage farce is barely held together as the actors, now sick of each other's company, have even more chaos behind the scenes. The fact that one of the stars (Amy Nuttall) and the ASM (Aisling Loftus) now know that the director (Robert Glenister) has been sleeping with both of them, doesn't help, and his constantly foiled attempts to placate them with flowers is a highlight. With one series of mishaps and misunderstandings on one side of the set and another on the other, this central act is sublime madness.

If there's a downside to the play it's that this is a hard act to follow and our final experience of the play, which takes us back to the audience's point of view for the final performance, can't live up to the middle section. Although there's still a lot of entertainment to be had as the action falls apart in a whole new way and Nuttall's Brooke is unable to stray from the script no matter what goes wrong².

Though I've seen the film before this is my first Noises Off on stage, and it seems to me much of the reason it's held in such high regard is the way it hangs a lantern on the mechanics of farce, how hard it is for the actors to make all the right "mistakes" and how easily it can go wrong. Fortunately Posner's cast don't put a foot wrong - or rather they constantly put a foot wrong, in all the right places.

Noises Off by Michael Frayn is booking until the 10th of March at the Old Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

¹Evil Alex commented that after being known for playing Miss Babs in Acorn Antiques, this costume sees Imrie looking more like Mrs Overall

²in which respect she was rather like our jobsworth usher tonight: I wanted Alex to take a picture of me peering around one of the Old Vic's many pillars for my userpic on this blog, to illustrate "Partially Obstructed View," but she forbade it. Then after the show she insisted we leave by the side door "because it's quicker" despite me saying I needed to go out the main way to use the loo. So I had to go out the side of the building then fight my way back in again. She's clearly been given a script of rules for the audience and this was NOT TO BE DEVIATED FROM!