Theatre review: Underdog: The Other Other Brontë

They might not be quite up there with Jane Austen in terms of enthusiastic fanbases undimmed through the centuries, but the Brontë sisters probably come in a close second, so Underdog: The Other Other Brontë seems a fairly safe bet to be a hit. Sarah Gordon's play is narrated by Charlotte (Gemma Whelan,) the oldest sister and the last to survive, and therefore the one who gets to decide how the authors will be remembered by history. And if Gordon's version of her is to be believed, that's exactly how she would have wanted it. With their alcoholic brother Branwell (James Phoon) getting through the family's money at a rate of knots, Charlotte, Emily (Adele James) and Anne (Rhiannon Clements) are pragmatic enough to plan how to make their own money.

Theatre review: The Good Person of Szechwan

The Lyric Hammersmith's programming is currently giving me flashbacks to my drama degree, and particularly playwrights who, if you'd believed my course, are produced way more regularly than they actually are. After Dario Fo and Franca Rame it's the turn of Bertolt Brecht, and his political morality tale The Good Person of Szechwan. Three gods come to Earth on a mission to find a good person: If there isn't at least one left in the world, they won't be able to avert an apocalyptic flood that will wipe out the unworthy mankind. They've landed in a very poor district, where people are too busy trying to keep themselves and their families alive to worry about anyone else, but prostitute Shen Te (Ami Tredrea) has a reputation for generosity, and is chosen as the experiment's subject. The gods give her $1000 to set her up for the future, and she uses it to buy a tobacconist's shop.

Theatre review: Hapgood

Howard Davies looks around the Tom Stoppard back catalogue and finds something of an oddity in Hapgood, a Cold War spy drama that opens with a dead letter drop in a swimming pool's changing rooms, with multiple briefcases and identically-dressed men making it look less like an exchange of secrets, more like a game of Find the Lady. Hapgood, codenamed Mother (Lisa Dillon,) is the British spymaster in charge of this operation, and when it goes Hapwrong it becomes obvious that someone on the team is betraying them. Suspicion seems to rest firmly on Ridley (Gerald Kyd,) but Hapgood's boss Blair (Tim McMullan) seems to think he can only have done it if she was in on it too. Or maybe he doesn't suspect her at all - the characters are all constantly trying to trip each other up in a series of traps and bluffs.

Theatre review: Hard Feelings

Unexpected pitfalls of putting on a play: If, as the audience enters, a TV on the set is showing Airplane!, even on mute, the audience may just end up watching and enjoying it, and be a bit resentful of the actors when they turn up and expect us to watch them instead. Well, this audience member might. The film is playing on video, rather a luxury I imagine as the year is 1981 and we are in the Brixton house owned by Isabella Laughland's Viv - or by her parents at any rate, living in America and letting their daughter live there to look after their investment. Viv shares the place with a few of her fellow Oxford graduates, although which of them exactly is meant to be a rent-paying resident at any given time is a bit vague, and subject to frequent change at her whim, or should she choose to take offense at something they say.