Theatre review: Road

In a rare instance of the Royal Court revisiting a past work, John Tiffany directs a 30th anniversary production of Road, Jim Cartwright’s slice of life in an unnamed Lancashire town. It seems a rather pointed revival of a play which comes down hard on Thatcher’s Britain, as despite the – nostalgic and funny by turns – period trappings it still feels relevant, its characters going out to get drunk and try to pull, covering up their desperation at the dead end their lives are in. Some have been led to unusual extremes, like Mike Noble’s Skin-Lad, a Buddhist skinhead, or Joey (Shane Zaza) and Clare (Faye Marsay,) dying in bed on hunger strike over something they can’t quite articulate. Most have more familiar stories of trying to cope though, and unemployed ex-sailor Scullery (Lemn Sissay) offers to be the audience’s tour guide over one typical Saturday night from dusk to dawn.

Theatre review: Electra

The current in-the-round configuration at the Old Vic is a suitably exposed setting for a good, but stark production of Sophocles' Electra. Perennially one of the most popular Greek Tragedies, it takes place near the end of the saga of the House of Atreus, so by the time we join the story it comes with a lot of baggage, well into a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. Before the Trojan War, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to secure the Greek army's fortunes. Never forgiving him for it, his wife Clytemnestra (Diana Quick) waited for his return then murdered him, with help from her lover Aegisthus (Tyrone Huggins.) Now they rule together, to the continuing dismay of her eldest daughter Electra. Driven mad by grief, she haunts the palace making threats; forbidden to leave or marry because of her continuing loyalty to her dead father, she vows revenge when her brother Orestes is old enough to return and carry it out.

Theatre review: Port

It's been almost half an hour since Simon Stephens wrote a new play and the National Theatre are clearly worried audiences might be suffering withdrawal symptoms. So they've dug into his archives and Marianne Elliott (who directed this play's premiere in 2002 and most recently collaborated with Stephens on The Curious Incident) directs Port in the Lyttelton. Over two-and-a-half hours Stephens makes the case for his home town of Stockport as the most depressing place on earth, a concrete tomb in Lizzie Clachan's design, where we first meet Racheal (Kate O'Flynn) in 1988, aged 11. In a drunken fit of violence her father Jonathan (Jack Deam) has locked himself into the flat so Racheal's mother Christine (Liz White) has taken her children to the car, where they sit all night waiting for a sign that Jonathan might let them back into their home.