Theatre review:Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle

While Mischief Theatre is still happily franchising around the world, its original cast have been doing more work separately since the TV show. Probably less of a big gossip-worthy falling out and more of a "The Play That Goes Wrong is celebrating a decade in the West End and they might fancy a change" thing, and the core writing trio of Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields are still together for their latest show, a spin-off from Magic Goes Wrong: Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle has Lewis reprise his titular psychic for a full two hours. He's joined by Sayer as Steve the Stooge, the Mind Mangler's flatmate who comes out of the audience in a series of impenetrable disguises (a T-shirt that says "audience member" and later a T-shirt that says "different audience member") and still can't manage to help get the tricks right.

Theatre review: The Tempest (Shakespeare's Globe / Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank)

Hey, you know what's a great way to stop me from spending an entire review of The Tempest ranting about how awful Prospero is? Edit the text so you cut out... more or less everything he does. Yes, for a second year the Globe has added a public performance schedule to the Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production - essentially a scaled-down version of a play on the curriculum, designed for school parties. Pleasingly, Diane Page's production follows the others I've seen both live and online, in that apart from cutting the script down to a little over 90 minutes, and some particularly shiny and gaudy designs from Moi Tran, this doesn't feel like a "kids'" version and doesn't patronise the audience for a second. The short running time also meant I could stand through it without hospitalising myself, and get to be in the thick of it as groundlings with my goddaughter Evie.