Theatre review: Dealer's Choice

Dealer's Choice is a play I've got a bit of history with: I saw the original 1995 production at what was then called the Cottesloe at the National, and was so impressed with it that I chose one of its scenes to workshop as part of my university directing course. I also caught the Menier's 2007 revival, and that clearly made an impact too, as it turns out my memory of who originally played the characters was a mix of those two casts. So it was hard to resist Matthew Dunster's 30th anniversary production at the Donald and Margot Warehouse, now coming to it as a play I'm in many ways very familiar with, but at the same time haven't encountered in 18 years. Patrick Marber's debut play takes place in a small, barely-afloat restaurant owned and run by Stephen (Daniel Lapaine,) with the help of an all-male skeleton staff who join him every Sunday night after closing for their weekly poker game.

Theatre review: Why Am I So Single?

Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss' SIX was very much an outlier in how modern musical theatre hits tend to be made: A small-scale musical written at university and taken to Edinburgh, it currently stands as a long-runner both in the West End and on Broadway, with its fanbase making its songs a streaming juggernaut as well. So with the team a firmly established one, launching a new musical straight into the West End comes with very different expectations, and surely the most high profile theatrical case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome in many years. So the premise of follow-up Why Am I So Single Question Mark feels audacious in just how basic it is: A pair of characters directly and explicitly modelled on Marlow & Moss have a case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome, and decide to base their next musical on their daily lives.

Theatre review: The Homecoming

Matthew Dunster's production of The Homecoming at the Young Vic sets Pinter's play firmly in the 1960s when it was written: The all-male family of East End gangsters at its heart are an insular group, buried away listening to jazz; the female interloper is a vision of the swinging sixties, up on all the latest fashions and wanting the best of them. What the power balance is by the end of the play is always enigmatic, but Dunster's apparently clear telling of the story may leave it murkier than ever. Max (Jared Harris) is the widowed patriarch who raised his three sons on his own - it's unlikely he'd ever acknowledge that his probably-gay brother Sam (Nicolas Tennant,) who's lived with them for decades, might have helped at all.

Theatre review: The Tempest (Shakespeare's Globe / Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank)

Hey, you know what's a great way to stop me from spending an entire review of The Tempest ranting about how awful Prospero is? Edit the text so you cut out... more or less everything he does. Yes, for a second year the Globe has added a public performance schedule to the Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production - essentially a scaled-down version of a play on the curriculum, designed for school parties. Pleasingly, Diane Page's production follows the others I've seen both live and online, in that apart from cutting the script down to a little over 90 minutes, and some particularly shiny and gaudy designs from Moi Tran, this doesn't feel like a "kids'" version and doesn't patronise the audience for a second. The short running time also meant I could stand through it without hospitalising myself, and get to be in the thick of it as groundlings with my goddaughter Evie.

Theatre review: Baghdaddy

Whoa, Baghdaddy (Bam-ba-lam)

Jasmine Naziha Jones' wildly hyperactive playwrighting debut Baghdaddy deals with the guilt of a woman who feels she could have done more to support her British-based Iraqi father when he was trying to process the wars in the country where much of his family still lived; but how much could she be expected to understand, when she was eight years old at the time? In Milli Bhatia's production the playwright herself plays Darlee, who remembers her Dad (Philip Arditti) and how he coped with living in safety while Baghdad was burning on the news. In both the 1990s' and 2000s' wars, he tried to support his family by doing one-man humanitarian runs, smuggling medicine, cash, and information held back by the regime to neighbouring countries where his brother could collect them. But back at home, all Darlee sees is her beloved father becoming distant.

Theatre review: Henry V (Headlong)

This year's second London Henry V is a radically different beast than the Donmar's bombastic war epic, and different in fact from any I've seen before in 30 or so years of Shakespeare productions. The clichéd view of the play is of a jingoistic celebration of Englishness, but in the last two decades it's been rare to see it through anything other than a cynical eye as a story of British imperialism, and increasingly through the prism of an arrogant attitude towards Europe. Holly Race Roughan's production for Headlong, which opens at the Swanamaker before transferring to Leeds and Northampton next year, takes it right out of the canon of Shakespeare's Histories, reimagining it entirely as a brooding and claustrophobic Tragedy. And if I was less excited than some about Kit "Christopher" Harington's casting earlier this year, Big Favourite Round These Parts Oliver Johnstone getting his chance at one of the big Shakespearean leads is more the kind of thing to grab my attention.

Theatre review: Chasing Hares

The Cut is a street absolutely packed with restaurants, and on a much more comfortable summer night after a heatwave that means it's bustling when the Young Vic lets out for an interval at 8:40pm. Not just with people eating out - tonight there was a positive Tour de France of Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat delivery riders trying not to crash into each other. It's like a free bit of scene-setting atmosphere for Sonali Bhattacharyya's Chasing Hares, whose framing device sees present-day London food delivery rider Amba (Saroja-Lily Ratnavel) frustrated by the app she works for, which requires her to stay on standby, unpaid, in the hope that an order will come in; as well as needing the money herself, she wants to chip in to help a colleague who's had his bike stolen. This sense of community among riders who in theory should be competing for orders is one her father would like to see harnessed to get them better pay and conditions.

Theatre review: Rare Earth Mettle

Like every other industry at the moment, London theatre can't seem to let a year go by without a scandal; and since "getting to run the National despite presiding over the Spacey years at the Old Vic" apparently isn't troubling anyone, it's fallen to the Royal Court instead, and Al Smith's Whoops I Done An Antisemitism binfire surrounding Rare Earth Mettle. The furore surrounded Smith giving a stereotypically Jewish name to the morally dubious millionaire at the centre of the story, which is ironic because this could all have been avoided if he'd just called him something like Melon Husk - it's not like the inspiration is subtly concealed. Instead he's been renamed Henry Finn (Arthur Darvill,) a man who's made a fortune in tech and has ploughed it all into an electric car company (called Edison, because like I say... not subtle.)

Theatre review: White Pearl

I was getting occasional flashbacks to Clybourne Park in the Royal Court Downstairs as a black comedy about race goads its characters into voicing their most extreme thoughts to a mix of laughter and shocked gasps from the audience. But instead of America’s relationship with blackness it’s Asia’s relationship with whiteness that Anchuli Felicia King explores in White Pearl. Inspired by real-life advertising campaigns that went viral for the wrong reasons, Moi Tran’s set is the flashy Singapore headquarters of a comparatively new cosmetics company that’s been fast becoming a market leader in a number of countries; to reflect this, Indian founder Priya (Farzana Dua Elahe) and her Singaporean right-hand woman Sunny (Katie Leung) have made sure all the executives are women representing the different countries where their products are sold.

Theatre review: Deluge

Moi Tran's set for Fiona Doyle's Deluge has certainly taken the play's title literally: The traverse stage is flooded, with a raised central platform forming a kitchen area on which most of the action takes place. The front rows have been given towels because there's a lot of splashing about - I found that sitting on the left-hand audience bank from the entrance, and draping the towel over my legs and bag were enough to keep me dry, although when a chair gets chucked into the water it's every man for himself. All the water is because the play has an apocalyptic feel, with biblical levels of flooding - Ireland, where the story is set, has it pretty bad, but from what we hear America has it much worse. As more clouds gather overhead, farmer Kitty (Elaine Cassidy) is behind bars.