Theatre review: The Cutting of the Cloth

After a couple of explosive shows to open the year, things get very low-key in Southwark Playhouse's Large space with the posthumous premiere of Michael Hastings' The Cutting of the Cloth. The setting is the basement workshop of a Savile Row tailor's in 1953, where Spijak (Andy de la Tour) and his daughter and "kipper" - a tailor's female assistant - Sydie (Alexis Caley) make a suit or two a week, lovingly hand-stitching all but a single seam. He prides himself on the quality of his work, but Eric (Paul Rider) and his kipper Iris (Abigail Thaw) machine-sew everything, making twice as many suits and taking home twice as big a paycheck. The two men have a family history, and they take out their personal frustrations with each other by having regular arguments over their very different ways of working.

Theatre review: Lee Harvey Oswald: A Far Mean Streak of Independence Brought on by Negleck

Judging by the amount of anniversaries being celebrated at the moment it was all kicking off fifty years ago. The National Theatre has just marked its half-century and Doctor Who is about to do the same. But the latter had an inauspicious start when its premiere episode was overshadowed by John F Kennedy's assassination. The events of Dallas have of course gone on to become the bread and butter of conspiracy theorists to this day, but with the assassin only outliving the President by 48 hours, doubts were cast over Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt from the start. By 1966 playwright Michael Hastings had attempted to shed light on the situation with Lee Harvey Oswald: A Far Mean Streak of Independence Brought on by Negleck. The subtitle is a quote from Oswald's own diaries, and gives a clue about the kind of chaotic personality we're going to be looking at.