Theatre review: Boys from the Blackstuff

Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff has become the stuff of legend, so even though I've never seen it - even if I'd been living in the UK at the time, I'd have been seven when the original TV series aired in 1982 - there's many iconic images and catchphrases from the show I'm familiar with. An early and influential critique of Thatcher's Britain, I won't go into the reasons a story about the unemployed being both left without a safety net and blamed for their predicament seems ripe to revisit today - we'd be here all night. I guess if you want to tell a story about men who just want to work there's some logic to getting an officially diagnosed workaholic to do it, so James Graham is on adaptation duties for Kate Wasserberg's production, which debuted at Liverpool's Royal Court before this brief run at the National, with a West End run coming next due to high demand.

Theatre review: Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial

It's ………

A speedy journey of less than a year from real-life courtroom drama to verbatim stage drama, the background to Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial is a story I should probably recap, although I have a feeling this very British celebrity feud is one that probably became infamous worldwide: Two women best known for being the wives - aka WAGs - of top-flight football players, Coleen Rooney (Laura Dos Santos) and Rebekah Vardy (Lucy May Barker) had been fodder for newspaper gossip columns for years. When an increasing number of personal stories were published about her, Rooney suspected someone on her private Instagram account had been leaking them to the press and set a classic trap: She planted fake stories only her prime suspect could see, and when they duly appeared in the papers she publicly called her out in the most famous ellipsis since Monty Python: "It's ……… Rebekah Vardy's account.”

Stage-to-screen review: Hushabye Mountain

In the 1980s and '90s there was a whole raft of gay plays dealing - albeit sometimes with charm and humour, like Angels in America or My Night With Reg - with the bleak reality of living through the AIDS pandemic. In more recent years there have been new approaches to the subject, whether it be assessing the legacy of a lost generation like The Inheritance, or seeing what the disease means to younger gay men like Undetectable, Jumpers for Goalposts, or the recent Cruise. But Jonathan Harvey's Hushabye Mountain dates from 1999, and it consciously attempts to deal with an uncertain period of hope somewhere in between the two: AIDS still dominates gay men's lives and people are being lost to it, but AZT trials are promising a real hope of successful treatment. It's no longer an automatic death sentence but for Danny (Nathan McMullen,) currently in a celestial waiting room somewhere outside the Pearly Gates, it's come just a little bit too late.

Theatre review: Blood Knot

Probably South Africa's best-known living playwright, Blood Knot is one of Athol Fugard's earliest (1961) anti-Apartheid plays, and it's one in which the regime splits a family down the middle. Sons of the same black mother but with different fathers, Zach (Kalungi Ssebandeke) is black, while his brother Morrie (Nathan McMullen) can pass for white, but has lived most of his life on the black side of the divide. There was a brief period when Morrie went away, but he returned a year ago to their shared shack where, for reasons that are never explicitly revealed, he seems to stay 24/7. Zach goes out to work - as a gatekeeper making sure no black kids go into a white park - and does the shopping, while Morrie stays at home every day cooking and planning for the small farm they'll buy when they've saved up enough of his brother's wages. But after a year, Zach is also feeling trapped.