Theatre review: The Toxic Avenger

In what's definitely becoming something of a Southwark Playhouse specialty, it's another kitsch American musical based on an unlikely source - this time the cult 1980s Troma horror movie by Lloyd Kaufman (who was in tonight's audience and got a shout-out from the cast,) The Toxic Avenger. Tromaville, New Jersey is the world's toxic waste capital, thanks to the corrupt Mayor (Lizzii Hills) who secretly owns the company dumping mysterious green sludge everywhere. When nerdy environmental activist Melvin Ferd the Third (Mark Anderson) finds out what she's been up to, the Mayor has her goons drown him in a vat of toxic waste. But instead of killing him it transforms him into a deformed, smelly but super-strong monster, and as The Toxic Avenger - or Toxie to his girlfriend, the blind librarian Sarah (Hannah Grover) - he goes on a violent rampage to clean up Tromaville.

Theatre review: The Hard Man

About as big a contrast as you could ask for with the French Riviera exploits it shares a stage with, the Finborough's current alternate show takes us to a Scottish prison cell in the 1970s. One of the writers of The Hard Man, Jimmy Boyle, was still in jail when it was first produced, and when he collaborated with playwright Tom McGrath on what is clearly an autobiographical story. Johnny Byrne (Martin Docherty) narrates the first act from his prison cell, as he goes over his teenage years. Growing up with no prospects, he and his friends Bandit (Adam Harley) and Slugger (Jack McMillan) graduate quickly from petty theft to catching the eye of a local criminal who offers them jobs in his illegal after-hours bars. By the time they're 16 they're well into Glasgow's underworld and Johnny in particular thinks they've outgrown their henchman roles and should be running things - he's also acquired a liking to marking anyone who crosses him by slashing their face with a straight-razor.

Theatre review: A Thousand Miles of History

Last year the Royal Court did one of its Theatre Local seasons in the Bussey Building in Peckham, and the venue is now attempting to continue as a performance space. Although the third floor of a freezing building in a gloomy back alley off Rye Lane is perhaps a hard sell as a theatre, as evidenced by tonight's turnout: A Thousand Miles of History may be flawed, but it deserves an audience bigger than the seven people¹ it got tonight. Harold Finley's play looks at the rise and fall of two of the biggest New York artists of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat (Michael Walters) and Keith Haring (Simon Ginty.) In a white warehouse space, hung with blank canvases in Mike Lees' design, Basquiat and Haring are friends who take the art scene by storm, blocking from their minds the knowledge that being the height of fashion means an inevitable fall from favour is coming.