Theatre review: Under the Shadow

While I'm generally happy to trust in Rupert Goold's judgement and have been booking every show in his final Almeida season, the announcement that the latest was an adaptation of an Iranian film about the 1980s Iran-Iraq War seemed like it might be a hard sell to get any of my friends to join me, so I only bought a ticket for myself. Maybe if I'd realised it was based on a horror film I might have got an extra seat, as there's a couple of people that Under the Shadow would have appealed to. Set in 1988 Tehran, Carmen Nasr's adaptation of Babak Anvari's film could of course be using supernatural horrors as a metaphor for war and carnage in general, but in fact the story being told here is much more specific to the time, the place, and particularly the experience of women whose rights have recently been curtailed, perhaps more than some yet realise.

Theatre review: Blue Heart

Shopping and Fucking might be the most attention-grabbing title getting a 20th anniversary revival but, already long-established by the time Mark Ravenhill & co emerged, Caryl Churchill showed around the same time that she could more than match the new faces for experimentation in form - even if, like her more recent Escaped Alone, she does it with middle class ladies rather than sexually charged Gen X-ers. Blue Heart is in fact a double bill of short works that play around with, in the first instance form, and in the second case language. In Heart's Desire, Alice (Amelda Brown) and Brian (Andy de la Tour) are waiting for their daughter Susy (Mona Goodwin) to arrive from the airport; She emigrated to Australia and this is her first visit back. But the wait is infinitely prolonged because Churchill keeps taking the action back to the start, or to a particular point in the conversation.