Theatre review: Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage

An interesting day to see Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage, as today director Max Stafford-Clark has been interviewed for an article about how, despite great reviews, his latest touring show has played to dwindling audiences, blaming arts funding cuts for the regions losing their taste for new theatre. Of course, last year's offerings from Out of Joint were This May Hurt A Bit and Pitcairn, so people may just have been wary of getting burned a third time. Robin Soans' verbatim play (with a few reconstructed scenes) about openly gay rugby player Gareth Thomas is, though, a much better proposition; and if tonight's audience at the Arcola is anything to go by, it's coming a lot closer to filling the house on this final London leg of its tour. Gay audiences will surely find a lot of interest in the story of the first major international sportsman to come out, but Thomas isn't the sole focus of Soans' play.

Theatre review: Pitcairn

In his most recent play Great Britain a couple of months ago, Richard Bean gave the Queen a line about "looking forward to our visit to the Pitcairn islands." So Bean's critics can add product placement to his list of crimes as Pitcairn is in fact the title of his next project, a production from Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint with Shakespeare's Globe, where it lands as part of its tour. The last war play in the Globe's 2014 season comes with the depressing message that a civil war can break out even in a nation that consists of a couple of dozen people. These are the former mutineers of the Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian (Tom Morely,) who after stopping off in Tahiti to pick up wives and convince a couple of local men to join them as well, have sailed to the uninhabited island of Pitcairn, where they hope to build a Utopian society - and hide from the Royal Navy who'd quite like to hang them all.

Theatre review: This May Hurt A Bit

How do you follow up a musical about piss? If you're the St James Theatre, it seems, you do it with a play that's really quite shit. Over at Out of Joint, writer Stella Feehily and director Max Stafford-Clark have discovered this exciting new form of political theatre from Russia called agitprop, which they've taken less than a century to bring to the UK. The destruction by stealth of the National Health Service is an incredibly disturbing subject that should be more honestly reported by the media, and one that deserves a lot better than Feehily's This May Hurt A Bit. The play feels so dated it has the opposite effect of what it intends: The topic is an urgent and current one, but the hackneyed attempts to bring it to the stage make the play, and consequently the subject it tries to highlight, feel like a museum piece.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good toured last year, but that hasn't put original director Max Stafford-Clark off returning to it with his Out of Joint company to mark its 25th anniversary. The play has become an A'level set text, and accordingly the St James Theatre - where the new production ends a national tour - was fuller than I'm used to seeing it, largely with school parties. From the snippets of conversation I overheard, Our Country's Good inspires a lot of strong feeling in the teenagers who study it, and they seemed completely satisfied by a production that's been cast with a number of actors who aren't exactly household names, but will be familiar to theatre aficionados. Most of them have to play multiple roles in Wertenbaker's sometimes overtly Brechtian telling of the true-ish story of the early days of Australia, when some of the recently-arrived prisoners performed George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer.