Theatre review: Entertaining Mr Sloane

Nadia Fall moves from Stratford to Southwark, and launches her time at the Young Vic with Entertaining Mr Sloane, Joe Orton's first full-length play that feels like Pinter played as farce. It's a comparison that Peter McKintosh's design particularly calls to mind: The in-the-round set is surrounded by junk, not just around the stage but hanging perilously over it, reminding us that this twisted version of a 1960s suburban house stands alone in the middle of a scrapheap. Kath (Tamzin Outhwaite) brings back Mr Sloane (Jordan Stephens,) a young man she met in a library and offered to let out the spare room to. When she was very young Kath had a husband and a baby son, and lost both of them; she's decided that the new lodger is going to be a replacement figure for both, and the fact that she tries to seduce him while asking that he call her "mama" isn't the only creepy thing that'll happen while he's there.

TV review: Talking Heads - A Chip in the Sugar /The Outside Dog / Bed Among the Lentils

It's hard to separate Alan Bennett's Talking Heads from their original performers but my next selection of remakes sees their actors put a new stamp on them. In among the collection of current and future dames each of the two original series had one male monologue, and the original series opened with Bennett himself in A Chip in the Sugar. So if any piece is associated with the writer's distinctive voice even more than the others it's this one, and Martin Freeman is the actor taking on the role of Graham for director Jeremy Herrin. Like most of the actors in this remake Freeman isn't trying too hard to emulate the original accent, which might lose something in authenticity but helps avoid too many direct comparisons. Graham is a closeted middle-aged man who lives with his mother, having had trouble living alone in the past due to paranoid schizophrenia. He's now on medication but his mother's chance meeting with an old boyfriend from her youth unsettles his routine and he starts to think the house is being watched again; except maybe this time it actually is.

Theatre review: Three Sisters

For London's second major Three Sisters of the year the National filters Chekhov through Inua Ellams, coming up with a new play that's the same but different: Olya, Masha and Irina are now Lolo (Sarah Niles) Nne Chukwu (Natalie Simpson) and Udo (Racheal Ofori,) turn-of-the-twentieth century Russia becomes a remote part of Nigeria in the late 1960s, and the sisters long for Lagos, not Moscow. The characters have new names but in the first and fourth acts especially they follow their counterparts' trajectories closely, but it's in the middle two acts that the play most takes on a new identity. The play opens in 1967 in Biafra, at the start of what would turn out to be a failed bid for independence from Nigeria. It's youngest sister Udo's birthday, which is also the anniversary of their father's death; he was a general who moved the family from Lagos to a remote village to prepare the rebel army for the coming uprising, but with him gone they’re left with no purpose, and only soldiers for company.

Theatre review: King Hedley II

Part of Nadia Fall's mission statement for her inaugural season at Theatre Royal Stratford East was to put the venue back on the theatrical map, and on the one hand a powerful play by a respected American playwright starring a much-loved British actor is a great way to do that, and the theatre seemed nearly full tonight. On the other hand keeping the start time at 7:30 for a three-and-a-half hour play does make it a pretty off-putting prospect for anyone who doesn't live locally, and faces a long journey home at 11pm. King Hedley II turns out to be worth the hassle, just about, but it's a heavy-going evening. This takes me up to 4 plays in August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, the second I've seen to star Sir Leonard of Henry, and is the 1980s entry in his ten-play sequence about black life in America in every decade of the 20th Century.

Theatre review: R and D

After its usual summer lull Hampstead Downstairs starts its new season with Simon Vinnicombe's R and D, a short sci-fi take on grief and betrayal. Lewis (Aden Gillett) is a writer who lost his wife a year ago, and whose moving eulogy for her went viral; the resulting popularity has only driven him further into grief and seclusion. His brother David (Martin Hutson) is a scientist working at some mysterious institute, the nature of which becomes apparent when he asks Lewis to take part, in return for a large fee, in some research and development on a long-running project. April (Jess Murphy) is a highly-realistic humanoid robot, and David and his team have reached the end of what they can find out in the lab. They want Lewis to spend time alone with her and report back on how convincingly human April can be.

Theatre review: The Suicide

2016 definitely likes its comedy dark, and after the serious version as the Almeida used the moving (literally) Boy to look into a young man feeling disenfranchised in modern Britain, the National takes the same subject and plays it for big laughs. Suhayla El-Bushra's The Suicide is an adaptation of a controversial Stalin-era Russian satire by Nikolai Erdman, and sees Javone Prince's affable everyman Sam Desai frustrated after five years without a job, his wife Maya (Rebecca Scroggs) having to support them both, and the two living in her mother Sarah's (Ashley McGuire) flat. When he tries to help a friend he ends up late for the Job Centre, meaning he has his benefits sanctioned and, feeling completely useless, goes to the top of his tower block in the middle of the night, toying with the idea of jumping off.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Whenever I review a Shakespeare play, I make a note in the subject line of the company or venue, as there's so many productions of his plays I think it's best to be clear which one I'm talking about. I almost feel like I should do the same for Our Country's Good, because despite only first seeing it in 2012, this is now my third production. Timberlake Wertenbaker's play is an undisputed modern classic (though not one of the 101 best play ever according to Michael Billington but it's fine - he asked an imaginary woman what she thought and she agreed with him.) Based on true events, it follows one of the first shipments of convicts to be transported to Australia in 1788, to the area that would become Sydney. For the duration of their sentences they will remain prisoners, watched over by the army, but when their time is done they'll be sent out to colonise the new land.

Theatre review: Dara

Based on the story of the 17th century Indian princes whose mother's death inspired the building of the Taj Mahal, Shahid Nadeem’s Dara is adapted by Tanya Ronder and directed by Nadia Fall for the National. Dara (Zubin Varla) is the oldest brother and Crown Prince, expected to succeed the Emperor of Hindustan. But after dispensing with youngest brother Murad (Rudi Dharmalingam,) the middle brother Aurangzeb (Sargon Yelda) mounts a coup, imprisoning Dara and their father, and installing himself as Emperor. Beloved of the people, Dara will always be a threat, but having him killed off will only make him a martyr. The solution comes in Dara's books of poetry and religious philosophy, in which the devout Muslim examines the teachings of other faiths. If Aurangzeb can have him condemned as an apostate to Islam, his blood won't seem to be on his hands.

Theatre review: Hobson's Choice

Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice is apparently both a GCSE text and an old stalwart of regional rep. As a result it's the sort of play whose title I'm familiar with but I've never actually seen. Written in 1915 but set in Victorian Salford, it gets a further time shift in Nadia Fall's production in Regent's Park, which moves the action to the 1960s - probably as late as you could take its title character's attitudes. The affable Mark Benton plays against type as Henry Horatio Hobson, who's run his own shoe shop for years. But since the death of his wife, his daughters Maggie (Jodie McNee,) Alice (Nadia Clifford) and Vickey (Hannah Britland) have been running the place for no wages, while he spends his days in the local pub, the Moonraker's¹. But business is booming, because in the basement workshop is young shoemaker Willie Mossop (Big Favourite Round These Parts Karl Davies) whose boots are so good all the wealthier ladies of Salford flock to the shop.

Theatre review: Chewing Gum Dreams

The second offering in The Shed's pairing of monologues by women, playing a 9:30 show after riverrun, is a lot more down to earth and a lot closer to home. Hackney, to be precise, where Michaela Coel grew up, and where she sets Chewing Gum Dreams, which she also performs. Coel plays Tracey, a 14-year-old girl dealing with friends, school and her budding love life, as well as the way these elements come together when her best friend ends up in a relationship with an abusive older man, and the knock-on effect colours the way Tracey herself is perceived. As with most monologues written by actors to perform themselves, there's more than a suggestion of Chewing Gum Dreams being primarily a showcase for Coel's talents. It does at least do this pretty effectively and organically, a variety of characters and emotions on display.

Theatre review: Home

Director Nadia Fall has put together a verbatim play for The Shed, in one of the temporary venue's most successful productions so far. Home is set at Target East, an East London hostel for young people with a pretty bad reputation locally. Through interviews with the people who live and work in a real hostel, Fall attempts not only to highlight it as a place that does important, undervalued work, but also to expose its residents, no matter what their backgrounds, as more than just the uniform mass of feral youth the media portrayed them as around the time of the 2011 riots. Most of the people living in the hostel had been homeless prior to getting their place there; many had fled abusive homes, or been disowned and thrown out by their families, or had brushes with the law, even spent time in prison.

Theatre review: Disgraced

An explosive approach to race relations seems to be a popular way to impress the Pulitzer judges; this year's winner in the drama category was Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, which sees a dinner party for two interracial couples go horribly wrong. Amir (Hari Dhillon) is a reasonably successful corporate lawyer, a Pakistani-American who changed his last name from Abdullah to Kapoor to put people off the scent that he was raised a Muslim. His white wife Emily (Kirsty Bushell) is an artist; in contrast to Amir who is vocal about having rejected his family's religion, Emily makes paintings that overtly acknowledge the influence of Islam on Western art. Their marriage seems pretty happy on the surface, but their disagreements over religion are a recurring issue - Emily's insistence that Islam is not inherently hate-filled coming up against her husband's argument that his upbringing says otherwise.

Theatre review: Hymn and Cocktail Sticks

If Alan Bennett's new play People turned out not to be what everyone was expecting - and not in a good way - the National has teamed it up with a pair of autobiographical shorts that are much more classic Bennett, in style but more importantly in quality. Alex Jennings plays Bennett himself as the narrator of Hymn and Cocktail Sticks, one of which plays in repertory before evening performances of People; and both can be seen as a double bill on selected Sundays. Jennings is not an actor you'd immediately think of as physically similar to the playwright, which makes his transformation all the more impressive: Having worked with the writer on The Habit of Art it's not entirely surprising if Jennings has picked up the writer's voice and, crucially to the telling of these stories, its particular inflections and quirks.

Theatre review: The Doctor's Dilemma

While a lot has been written about the topicality of a play being revived in the Olivier (Timon of Athens, which I won't be seeing until next week,) the National's middle stage is also playing host to a classic play with a lot of current relevance. The Doctor's Dilemma, which has just opened at the Lyttelton, is Bernard Shaw's look at the medical profession, and in particular the dangers that private medicine (which we seem to be steadily being pushed back towards) can hold. The title does what it says on the tin: Sir Colenso Ridgeon is a Harley Street doctor with a cure for tuberculosis that's still in the trial stages but which he thinks will guarantee success. Limited funds mean he can only treat ten patients, and he has to decide who gets the last available place: Selfless, generous but unremarkable Dr Blenkinsop (Derek Hutchinson,) who's treated the poor for years while his own health fails; or Louis Dubedat, a talented artist with an appalling personality.