Theatre review: London Wall

John Van Druten's London Wall is an ensemble comedy-drama set in a solicitor's office, casting a particular eye on what working life was like for women in the 1930s. Office manager Mr Brewer (Alex Robertson) has tried his luck with most of the typists - currently he's got his eye on newcomer Pat (Maia Alexander,) who doesn't heed the warnings of Miss Janus (Alix Dunmore.) 35 and engaged for 7 years to a foreign diplomat who seems to have lost interest, Miss Janus herself is afraid of becoming an old maid and being stuck in this low-paying job all her life. Meanwhile Miss Hooper (Emily Bowker) is seeing a man who swears he'll leave his wife for her, and Miss Bufton (Cara Theobold) doesn't mind being seen on a different man's arm every night. The personal crises that intrude on office life give a picture of women who may be more independent that the generation before them, but still have to rely on the hope of marriage as an escape from poverty.

Theatre review: The Sound of Heavy Rain

The casts of both Lungs and One Day When We Were Young come together for the final play in Paines Plough's Roundabout season at Shoreditch Town Hall, The Sound of Heavy Rain. Where the other two plays are intimate relationship stories, Penelope Skinner's contribution is a drily witty pastiche, relocating the hard-boiled detective tropes of film noir from LA to the rain-soaked streets of Soho. Dabrowski (Andrew Sheridan) is a PI who spends his nights drinking to get over being dumped, when the dowdy Maggie (Maia Alexander) arrives at his office with a case for him. Her best friend and flatmate has disappeared, and the detective sets off to find the glamorous cabaret singer Foxie O'Hara. But the further he gets into the case, the more Dabrowski starts to suspect that Foxie may never have even been real.

Theatre review: One Day When We Were Young

Touring company Paines Plough bring a series of new plays to London in the Roundabout Auditorium, a small wooden pop-up theatre that's reminiscent of the one Mike Bartlett displayed his Cock on. Set up in Shoreditch Town Hall, it's an intimate in-the-round space with three banks of seating with different-coloured cushions on them: At the box office there's jars with pink, blue and yellow buttons in them, and the colour you choose tells you which part of the auditorium to sit in - although, being small and in-the-round, it probably doesn't matter much where you end up. Judging by the spread of audience members, given that choice of colours, most people will go for blue, and pink is very unpopular. Andy and I sat in the yellow area for the first of the three plays, Nick Payne's One Day When We Were Young, directed by Clare Lizzimore.