Theatre review: The Busy World is Hushed

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The official opening is on Tuesday.

In Keith Bunin's The Busy World is Hushed, a woman struggles to prioritise the men in her life, two of whom are dead - one of them for the last two millennia. Hannah (Kazia Pelka) is an Episcopalian minister and bible scholar, whose husband drowned (possibly a suicide) a couple of months before she gave birth to their only son. Thomas (Michael James) has grown up restless and easily distracted, and has been disappearing from home for months at a time ever since he was 16, trying new ventures in life or just wandering out into the wilderness. He's now 26, older than his father was when he died, which has led him back home to delve through his papers and try to find out about a man his mother will tell him very little about. Hannah is worried he’ll leave again as soon as he finds what he’s looking for, but she’s got a plan to make him stick around a bit longer.

Theatre review: Four Play

The cliché about gay relationships is that everyone is cheerfully shagging around, so anyone in a more old-fashioned, monogamous pairing might well feel like they're missing out on something. Jake Brunger's Four Play looks at two gay couples in their twenties, a generation that's always had the option of civil partnerships and now marriage, for whom a traditional relationship is as much of an expected option as something a bit kinkier. Rafe (Cai Brigden) and Pete (Michael Gilbert) met at university, came out together and have been a monogamous couple for seven (and a half - it's an important distinction to Rafe) years. It means neither of them has ever slept with anyone else and, although they still insist everything is fine between them, they think a one-off with someone else might be the thing the shake off any seven-year-itch.