Theatre review: Hedda

Tanika Gupta throws Ibsen's proto-sociopath Hedda Gabler into a blender with the real-life story of silent screen star Merle Oberon, an Anglo-Indian woman who passed for white to make it in Hollywood, not being found out until after her death. In Hedda the title character is the daughter of a British General during the Raj and his Indian servant, who's bought her way out of a studio contract at great expense after becoming fed up with their control over her. In 1948 the War is over and India has been partitioned and given independence, and Hedda (Pearl Chanda) has just married her third (or possibly fourth) husband George Tesman (Joe Bannister,) a minor film director who's had to go into significant debt to keep his glamorous new wife in the style she's become accustomed to. This includes employing Rina Fatania's Shona, the maid who's been with Hedda all her life because she is, of course, actually her mother.

Theatre review: The Harmony Test

Writer Richard Molloy and director Alice Hamilton were the team behind low-key favourite Every Day I Make Greatness Happen in 2018 so their return to Hampstead Downstairs has to be worth a look: The Harmony Test takes us out of the classroom and into the kitchen, but if kids don't show up on stage they're on everyone's minds: Kash (Bally Gill) and Zoe (Pearl Chanda) are trying for a baby; their friends Naomi (Jemima Rooper) and Charlie's (Milo Twomey) only daughter has gone to university, leaving them wondering what's next. Charlie makes an offhand suggestion that Naomi join a gym to get her endorphin hit, something she does with gusto - almost immediately starting an affair with greased-up personal trainer Rocco (Sandro Rosta.) She leaves her husband and moves into Zoe and Kash's spare room, just as the couple get some major news.

Theatre review: Winter Solstice

As has become increasingly apparent over the last few years, the rest of the world doesn't seem to think Gemany might have any insights on fascism worth listening to. But the Germans, bless them, keep trying, with the latest warning coming from Roland Schimmelpfennig, whose Winter Solstice comes to the Orange Tree in a translation by David Tushingham. An upper middle class couple in a household we're told has never voted for a conservative party, Bettina (Laura Rogers) is a director of arthouse films nobody particularly wants to watch, while her husband Albert (Dominic Rowan) is a popular historian who's written a number of hit books. Both are having affairs, Bettina with Albert's best friend Konrad (Milo Twomey,) and the family tensions are particularly fraught as they wait for Bettina's mother to arrive.