Stage-to-screen review: Hamlet (Bristol Old Vic / BBC)

It's been a couple of years since I last saw a full production of Hamlet, and with a while yet before the next major one is due (now watch as another gets announced the second after I click Publish,) it seemed as good a time as any to check out the version the BBC offered up recently as part of their First Folio season. This was John Haidar's 2022 production at the Bristol Old Vic, one that had caught my eye for casting real-life husband and wife Finbar Lynch and Niamh Cusack as the king and queen of Denmark. Haidar didn't cast Calam Lynch in the lead to complete the family set, but instead Billy Howle plays Hamlet, the prince of Denmark who's moping quietly at the start of the play after his father's sudden death. Alex Eales' set is slickly black and I want to call Natalie Pryce's costumes modern-dress, except the characters' tech is very Nineties: Hamlet loves soliloquising into his dictaphone, and "The Mousetrap" is interrupted when Polonius' pager goes off.

Theatre review: August In England

Sir Lenny Henry has a couple of high-profile careers under his belt, with decades as a popular comedian followed by a move to classical acting later in life. Both feed into his playwrighting debut August In England, a monologue he also stars in and which opens with Henry arriving on stage to calypso music, pouring drinks for himself and the front row, and generally working the audience like a seasoned comic. It's perhaps not too surprising for an actor writing his first play to stick to a familiar persona, but I think there's something else going on here as well: In a sold-out show people have booked for its star power, he's reminding us that he's someone considered part of the fabric of this country, and his character August Henderson (I did wonder if the name was a tribute to the August Wilson plays Henry's appeared in) is very similar to his creator, with the crucial difference that Henry was born in the UK.

Stage-to-screen review: Good Grief

An intimate piece of theatre, created specially for streaming at home: Nearly a year into lockdown, can a one-act two-hander feel too different from a one-off TV drama? Natalie Abrahami has some ideas on how to make this feel, if not quite like theatre, like a hybrid of the two mediums as she directs Lorien Haynes' tragicomedy Good Grief for the screen. Adam (Nikesh Patel) has lost his partner Liv after eight years of cancer. Their friend Cat (Sian Clifford) is the last one left at his house after the wake, and one of the people who it seems best understands, if not entirely approves of, his eccentric ways of grieving. These include compartmentalising Liv's belongings around a house that's now far too big for just him in rooms like "the sad room" and "the boring room," and a lot of inappropriate humour, like opening the eulogy by mentioning Liv's extraordinary promiscuity before they got together.