Theatre review: The Trials

With climate catastrophe seeming more bleakly inevitable by the minute, you'd think the near future looked depressing enough without imagining an even more dystopian version of it; but fair play to Dawn King, whose The Trials goes for it anyway. At some point in the future, climate change has made the air outside unbreathable without masks, droughts and flooding are regular occurrences, and refugees have had to flee much of the planet for the few areas that are still just about habitable. Being the generation that will have to live with the consequences of what the preceding ones did, children and teenagers have seized control, and the twelve young protagonists of King's play have been called to two weeks' jury duty, to judge their elders' crimes. But these aren't politicians or industrialists who wilfully destroyed the environment for profit; all of them were tried long ago, and the spotlight has now moved onto anyone who could be considered to have done less than they could have to stop the disaster.

Theatre review: The Height of the Storm

After premiering in Bath and Richmond, The Height of the Storm is the latest Florian Zeller play to make it to the West End, with director Jonathan Kent taking a risk on putting two notoriously difficult actors on stage together. The vague description in the publicity suggests another rather dark, sad journey into confusion and failing mental health, and while I’m generally a fan of cheerier things, where this writer is concerned I’d rather see him return to intimate tragedies than the so-so farces of his lighter side. Anne (Amanda Drew) and Elise (Anna Madeley) have gone to their parents’ home in the French countryside for the weekend; it soon becomes apparent that one of their parents has recently died, but Zeller deals in confusion and it’s hard to figure out which one, as both André (Jonathan Pryce) and Madeleine (Eileen Atkins) appear on stage regularly.

Theatre review: Once in a Lifetime

It's fair to say my past experience with director Richard Jones' work hasn't been stellar; at least I didn't leave his last three shows at the interval, but that is partly down to the fact that they didn't have intervals. I've liked a couple of his shows though so went along to his return to the Young Vic, and though it's lacking in some crucial ways at least I wasn't tempted to take an early bath. Once in a Lifetime is a product of the ten-year playwrighting partnership of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, who had numerous Broadway hits, in a version restructured for 12 actors by Hart's son Christopher. (Not that 12 is a tiny cast, but it seems as if the original required so many bodies it became prohibitively expensive and nobody wanted to revive it.) It's obvious why extravagance might have been on the playwrights' agenda though as their subject is Hollywood, and the particular excitement after the first talking picture was released in 1927.