Theatre review: The Shape of Things

The production companies that last year brought Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park to the Park Theatre return, with another early hit from a playwright whose later career featured an unfortunate incident involving bees, Neil LaBute. The Shape of Things is the defining LaBute story on themes he's returned to many times - mainly around body image, and the battle of the sexes. Set in and around a college campus, Adam (Luke Newton) is overweight, nerdy and has few friends and fewer relationships. When working one of his two part-time jobs to pay his student loans, as security at an art gallery, he meets Evelyn (Amber Anderson,) an art postgraduate who's planning on defacing one of the statues as a protest against censorship. Far from stopping her he turns a blind eye because he's flattered by her flirting with him.

Theatre review: The Walworth Farce

After many delays Southwark Playhouse finally opens its new, permanent main house, a few minutes' walk away from its other venue on the other side of Elephant and Castle. Southwark Playhouse Elephant has staged a couple of community shows as a warm-up, but its first professional production is an overt reference to its new location: Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce takes place around the corner, in a 15th-floor council flat some years before the recent redevelopments that include the current building. Dinny (Dan Skinner) lives there with his two adult sons, and as the play begins Sean (Emmet Byrne) returns from his daily trip to Tesco, just in time for them to begin a performance: They will act out the day Dinny had to leave Ireland, fleeing to the flat that used to be his brother's before the events of that day.

Theatre review: Market Boy

David Eldridge’s Market Boy was commissioned for the Olivier in 2006, so the Union Theatre is a much smaller canvas for its first London revival; but there’s certainly something appropriate about the kaleidoscopic story of a busy market in the second half of the Eighties being housed in a repurposed row of railway tunnels. The titular Boy (Tommy Knight) first arrives at Romford Market in 1985 aged thirteen, when his Mum (Amy Gallagher) decides he needs a part-time job to make his pocket money. The Trader (Andy Umerah) gives him a job on his ladies’ shoe stall, which is obviously booming as he already has three other boys, Snooks (Joey Ellis,) Don (Callum Higgins) and Mouse (Joe Mason) working for him. And although from the start there are obvious tensions between some of the stallholders, the market is generally a busy and dynamic place with a lot of cash flying around.