Theatre review: Fatherland

Frantic Assembly’s verbatim piece Fatherland is the brainchild of director Scott Graham, composer Karl Hyde and playwright Simon Stephens, who come from Corby, Kidderminster and Stockport respectively. Their idea was to return to those home towns and conduct a dozen interviews with local men about fatherhood – most of them fathers themselves, all of them at least having something to say about their own fathers. The resulting play puts their thoughts and memories on stage in a text put together by Stephens, sometimes set to music by Hyde, and brought to typically physical life by Graham, but the actual interview process and creation of the play ends up being as much if not more of what it’s about: As well as casting actors to play their subjects, the trio put versions of themselves on stage too, with Nyasha Hatendi’s Simon and Declan Bennett’s Scott leading the interviews while Mark Arends’ Karl absent-mindedly records everything in the background.

Theatre review: After Electra

In her 2011/12 hit Jumpy, April De Angelis put a woman turning fifty at the heart of the action. For her new play - commissioned specifically to provide the sort of roles for older actresses that are in notoriously short supply - she puts a woman in her eighties centre-stage. Virgie (Marty Cruickshank) has been a moderately successful abstract artist, an inspiration to some but a black sheep in her own family. A hippie free spirit, when her marriage was failing she left her family, leading to her children being taken into care. Haydn (Veronica Roberts,) now a therapist with a tendency to analyse herself and everyone around her in Freudian terms at all times, and Orin (James Wallace,) with a disastrous marriage of his own under his belt, have reconciled with their mother after a fashion, but the youngest daughter was never returned to her, and who she might now be remains a mystery that haunts the whole family.

Theatre review: The Glass Supper

It's a common storytelling setup to have a seemingly happy domestic situation reveal its demons when unexpected guests intrude, but they don't always explode in quite such a surreal way as this: In The Glass Supper, Marcus (Michael Begley) and Colin (Owen Sharpe) appear on the surface to be the picture of a "respectable" gay couple. Together for 20 years and recently married, they've moved from London to a remote cottage where writer Marcus can work in peace, and the two of them can - at least in theory - give up smoking, drink and drugs. There's some tension in the air as Colin has so far failed to quit any of them, but it's nothing compared to what happens when a couple they met the year before on a gay cruise (of the ocean liner variety) turn up on their doorstep on the way to this year's holiday.