Theatre review: Playhouse Creatures

With Playhouse Creatures April De Angelis completes a loose trilogy of plays about some of the first women to achieve fame - or notoriety - in something like the modern sense. Whether the connection was intentional I don't know, although I'm guessing the fact that all three of the plays have been underwhelming to one extent or another wasn't part of the plan. In the 1660s Nell Gwynn (Zoe Brough) is still an orange-seller wishing she could join the ranks of the new female actors, only recently allowed onto the stage by Charles II. After being pipped to the only open spot for a new actress by Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr) she eventually tricks her way into a minor role, securing a more permanent spot after catching the eye of the men in the audience - and the King himself.

Theatre review: Infamous

For a small studio theatre, albeit a very central one, Jermyn Street Theatre gets to premiere new work by some well-known playwrights; although on recent form there does seem to be a reason these particular works don't find a more mainstream home. The latest is April De Angelis, whose Infamous is a weirdly unenthusiastic look at Georgian celebrity (and regular Blackadder punchline) Emma Hamilton. We first meet Emma (Rose Quentin) in 1798, the young wife of the septuagenarian ambassador to Naples. A former prostitute who climbed the social ladder as mistress to various powerful men, she's already achieved some notoriety as a close friend of the Neapolitan royals, whose influence makes her husband favour them over his own country's interests. But it's nothing compared to the infamy she's got planned.

Stage-to-screen review: Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare's Globe / Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank)

I mentioned recently that after 2020's overload of Romeo and Juliets failed to materialise for obvious reasons, it was due to turn up in 2021 in largely digital form. But before a rather odd-looking green screen affair and the National's repurposing of the Lyttelton into a TV studio turn up, there's a version already available on YouTube, and free to view (as ever, donations are encouraged,) until the end of next month. Last year I had my first experience of the Globe's Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank strand of shows for schools with the 2020 production of Macbeth, and now for their 2019 offering, and a 90-minute edit can't be a bad call for a play I tend to lose my patience with, can it? Certainly playing the story at speed can only accentuate the way Romeo (Nathan Welsh) and Juliet (Charlotte Beaumont) decide they're in love with each other having barely met.

Theatre review: The Invisible

The Bush Theatre's skylights and lack of air-conditioning make it one of the least comfortable London theatres during the hotter months, so its summer show needs to be something that can distract from this. It managed it flamboyantly in 2013 with Josephine and I, and with family tensions as heated as the atmosphere in 2014's Perseverance Drive, but this year's offering is a much drier affair, and I'm still not sure what - except the vague, as it turns out false suggestion of a cliffhanger - even brought me back to The Invisible after the interval. It's not for lack of an important topic: Rebecca Lenkiewicz's play looks at the brutal government cuts to Legal Aid, which in the Magna Carta anniversary year seem to break one of that document's major tenets, that Justice is not to be either bought or denied. But three of the characters in The Invisible can't pay for justice, so they may have to go without: Aisha (Sirine Saba) is an Indian arranged bride being beaten and restrained at home by her husband and his family; Ken (Nicholas Bailey) is being denied access to his children.

Theatre review: Variation on a Theme

The latter years of Terence Rattigan's life saw a decline in his popularity as the Kitchen Sink playwrights knocked him out of favour, and Variation on a Theme had a particularly unfortunate part to play in his story: It was the play Shelagh Delaney saw, and was so unimpressed by it propelled her to try and do better herself. Rattigan would eventually, posthumously, reclaim his place on British stages, with his better-known plays getting plenty of major revivals in recent years, but it takes the Finborough to unearth Variation on a Theme again half a century after it was last seen. And with the play Delaney wrote in response, A Taste of Honey, enjoying a major revival at the National right now, what better time to reevaluate whether Rattigan's offering deserves its ignominious place in history.