Theatre review: City of Glass

It's a week of adaptations within adaptations - last night's Obsession was an English translation of a Dutch stage adaptation of a film adaptation of a novel, and tonight City of Glass is Duncan Macmillan's version not just of Paul Auster's novel, but also specifically of Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli's graphic novel adaptation of the story. Which is itself full of retellings of itself, and who exactly is narrating it is very much up for discussion. To wit, the lead character of Daniel Quinn is played simultaneously by two actors: Chris New and Mark Edel-Hunt occasionally appear on stage together but mostly alternate scenes, swapping places during blackouts. In fact, given how low the lighting is, I imagine people sitting quite far from the stage would have taken a while to realise this was happening, as despite the two men not looking much alike, even from the third row of the stalls it sometimes took a moment to be sure which one was on stage.

Theatre review: Feast

A co-production between the Royal Court, who originally commissioned it, and the Young Vic where it now premieres, Feast aims to give a taste of the Yoruba diaspora: A culture that began in Nigeria, but largely due to the slave trade crossed the Atlantic and now exists in slightly different forms in a number of parts of the world. Rufus Norris' production has five writers (with a further five having contributed to the early stages of its development,) brought in to give an idea of what Yoruba culture means to Nigeria, Cuba, Brazil, the USA and the UK. We follow incarnations of three deities, Yemaya (Noma Dumezweni,) Oshun (Naana Agyei-Ampadu) and Oya (Michelle Asante) as they journey around the world and down the centuries, dealing with issues as small as family spats and as big as slavery; at the end we see four versions of the titular feast, as families from each country celebrate big occasions in their own distinct variations of the Yoruba tradition.