Stage-to-screen review: Our Town

The comparative theatrical quiet of August often means a chance for me to catch up on some digital versions of shows I'd missed, and NTatHome have just added Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in its recent touring co-production from The Actor Michael Sheen's Welsh National Theatre and the Rose Theatre in Kingston*. Sheen plays the Stage Manager, a figure who it occured to me this time I would be interested to see played quite sinister - Sheen doesn't go there, giving the affable character we usually see, but he does stress the way the play's narrator knows all the dark secrets of how the other characters' lives and deaths will pan out. I also felt we really got the idea of why, within the play's universe at least, it makes sense to give him that title: Especially in the final act he's seen engineering the story and the way it'll be told.

Theatre review: fiji land

Guantanamo Bay gets an absurdist makeover in Nick Gill's fiji land, which follows three men being slowly broken by a strange responsibility. Grainer (Jake Ferretti) has taken a well-paid job somewhere hot, remote, and in some way connected to the military. He shares his shifts with two others, working two-on, one-off: Wolstead (Matthew Trevannion) is a loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist who likes to document everything with a Polaroid camera. Tanc (Stephen Bisland) is laconic, sinister and, in some vague way, in charge. They work in a greenhouse "guarding" six rows of small pot-plants. When an alarm sounds, they have to water the plants - except for the back row, which is being "punished." Grainer tries to relate to his co-workers to help get through their work, but behind their confident facades they too are being slowly driven mad by what they do.