Theatre review: Ravenscourt

Qualified NHS therapist Georgina Burns' first fully-staged play Ravenscourt opens at Hampstead Downstairs, and though there's the odd line of clunky dialogue for the most part it goes against my usual complaint about the venue's sets being more fully developed than the scripts (although Debbie Duru's set is a nicely economical use of the space.) It's set within the NHS' Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, a service both lauded as a world leader in its ambition for helping the nation's mental health, and critically underfunded and oversubscribed. Ravenscourt is a psychiatric facility; the day surgery is loomed over by an institution for those with the most serious mental illnesses, and occasionally therapy sessions are interrupted by the patients next door having an attack. Lydia (Lizzy Watts) is a comparatively young therapist but she does have some years of private practice under her belt by the time she decides to join the public sector.

Theatre review: The False Servant

Paul Miller is coming up to his final season as Artistic Director of the Orange Tree, a theatre he notoriously took over on the day it lost all its funding. He turned its fortunes around with an eclectic menu of surprisingly ambitious new work alternating with reliable classics, predominantly from Rattigan and Shaw, and it'll be interesting to see how far his successor Tom Littler will want to tinker with a successful formula. One thing I won't miss if they go in the new regime are Miller's occasional ventures to 18th century France for the comedies of Pierre Marivaux, which between The Lottery of Love and the latest offering, The False Servant, haven't exactly got my pulse racing. A wealthy young woman (Lizzy Watts) is contemplating a potential suitor, but wants to be sure of his character. Disguising herself as a man and calling herself The Chevalier, she befriends Lelio (Julian Moore-Cook) and immediately finds out why she should avoid the match at all costs.

Theatre review: Either

Do the box office at Hampstead Theatre keep a nightly record of how people pronounce Either when collecting their tickets, and take bets on which pronunciation will win every night? And if not, WHAT EVEN IS THE POINT OF ANYTHING?

Two consecutive trips to Hampstead Theatre wasn't exactly planned but it's not always easy to space things out in my diary, especially when a season is announced at late as this one was. Still, it makes for an interesting way to judge a new Artistic Director's mission statement to make a kind of double bill of the launch shows in both the main and studio spaces, and Either certainly suggests Roxana Silbert won't want to be left behind when theatre starts experimenting with changing ways of looking at the world. Specifically, in this instance, the changing understanding of what gender is and how it affects people's interactions: Ruby Thomas' play is about a couple, but is explicitly genderless - a stage direction projected onto Bethany Wells' set at the start insists that the two characters can and should be played by any and all genders.

Theatre review: The Angry Brigade

Although a new James Graham play is always worth a look, when The Angry Brigade premiered last year I decided against going all the way to Watford for it, taking the gamble that it would probably make it to London sooner or later. And so it has, playing a season at the Bush during the election, which feels appropriate: Even though it takes its story from 1971 and only tangentially features any politicians, the Britain the titular organisation live in has a lot in common with 2015. The Angry Brigade feels almost like two different plays: In the first act, we meet a specially-assembled police investigation team, led by the newly-promoted Smith (Mark Arends,) who's been given the task of finding a terrorist organisation who've sent threatening letters against the pillars of traditional society. A couple of their explosive devices have also been discovered, and it's only a matter of time before one of them goes off.