Theatre review: Fatherland

Frantic Assembly’s verbatim piece Fatherland is the brainchild of director Scott Graham, composer Karl Hyde and playwright Simon Stephens, who come from Corby, Kidderminster and Stockport respectively. Their idea was to return to those home towns and conduct a dozen interviews with local men about fatherhood – most of them fathers themselves, all of them at least having something to say about their own fathers. The resulting play puts their thoughts and memories on stage in a text put together by Stephens, sometimes set to music by Hyde, and brought to typically physical life by Graham, but the actual interview process and creation of the play ends up being as much if not more of what it’s about: As well as casting actors to play their subjects, the trio put versions of themselves on stage too, with Nyasha Hatendi’s Simon and Declan Bennett’s Scott leading the interviews while Mark Arends’ Karl absent-mindedly records everything in the background.

Theatre review: After Electra

In her 2011/12 hit Jumpy, April De Angelis put a woman turning fifty at the heart of the action. For her new play - commissioned specifically to provide the sort of roles for older actresses that are in notoriously short supply - she puts a woman in her eighties centre-stage. Virgie (Marty Cruickshank) has been a moderately successful abstract artist, an inspiration to some but a black sheep in her own family. A hippie free spirit, when her marriage was failing she left her family, leading to her children being taken into care. Haydn (Veronica Roberts,) now a therapist with a tendency to analyse herself and everyone around her in Freudian terms at all times, and Orin (James Wallace,) with a disastrous marriage of his own under his belt, have reconciled with their mother after a fashion, but the youngest daughter was never returned to her, and who she might now be remains a mystery that haunts the whole family.

Theatre review: A Life

The Finborough used to be a pub theatre, then it was a pub theatre without a pub attached, then a wine bar theatre. Now it's a wine bar theatre without a wine bar attached, as yet another business on the ground floor unfortunately goes under. Upstairs though the theatre continues, touch wood, to thrive with another full house, for another of its "lost" classics - although in this case, apparently Hugh Leonard's memory play A Life is fairly regularly revived in its native Ireland, if not here. Desmond Drumm (Hugh Ross) is a couple of months away from retirement, but he won't get to enjoy it: He's told his wife that he's been diagnosed with an ulcer, but in reality he's been given less than six months to live. When he visits his estranged friend Mary to make up, it sets off memories of his youth, and we see him in his twenties (David Walshe,) the mistakes he made then - and the ones he continues to make even now with time running out.

Theatre review: The Drawer Boy

In 1972, a Canadian theatre company sent its actors out to various Ontario farms, to spend the summer working there and observing life in order to create a devised play. The resulting piece was considered a seminal part of Canadian theatre-making, but Michael Healey's gentle but compelling 1999 play The Drawer Boy imagines how that summer's research might have affected both the actors, and the farmers whose lives it put under the spotlight. Miles (Simon Lee Phillips,) a young actor, is taken in at a farm occupied by two elderly men, once childhood friends who went on to fight in World War II together. Angus (John Bett) received an injury that left him with a metal plate in his head, migraines and a memory that can hold on to almost nothing except numbers. Morgan (Neil McCaul) tends to the farm, looks after his friend, and nightly tells him a fairytale version of their lives, Angus' war injury and the English girls they loved and lost.