Theatre review: 46 Beacon

A gentle - perhaps too gentle - coming out story parks up at the smaller Trafalgar Studio for a month, Bill Rosenfield's 46 Beacon looking back at gay life in early 1970s America through rose-tinted glasses. Or possibly rose-tinted velour. Robert (Jay Taylor) is an English actor approaching middle age, who's taken a job in a Boston theatre to take a break from problems at home. Alan (Oliver Coopersmith) is a teenager with a part-time job at the theatre, and Robert has spotted and taken an interest in him, noticing that Alan is interested too. After one performance he invites him back to his small flat where he gently seduces him. And yes, although it's made clear Alan wants to be seduced but is mostly just reticent because of nerves about his first time and admitting his sexuality to himself, there is a bit of a creepy undertone to the age gap (though Robert doesn't realise at first just how big the gap is. The age gap, not his anus.)

Theatre review: The Mikvah Project

Last year the stage of the Yard Theatre got pretty dirty when Stink Foot flooded it with treacle, so it's understandable if it's due a thorough cleansing. A ritual Jewish cleansing, as it turns out in Josh Azouz's The Mikvah Project, for which designer Cécile Trémolières has put an actual, large heated pool on stage. The Mikvah, our narrators tell us, is a Friday night ritual usually associated with the most Orthodox Jews. 35-year-old Avi (Jonah Russell) has been married for seven years, happily so although his and his wife's inability to conceive is the main source of friction between them. He goes to the Mikvah to pray for a child, and while there strikes up a friendship with laddish 17-year-old choirboy Eitan (Oliver Coopersmith.) Unexpectedly, Eitan makes a pass at him, and even more unexpectedly Avi's protestations of not being interested don't ring that convincing, even to him.

Theatre review: Once a Catholic

The canteen at my work, like every canteen in the country as far as I can tell, always has fish and chips on a Friday; a sign that, although England hasn't been a Catholic country since Henry VIII found himself with more wives than the legal limit, the religion's influence is still felt in all kinds of unexpected places. One place you wouldn't be too surprised to find a supply of Catholic guilt is in a convent school in 1957 Willesden, the setting for Mary J. O'Malley's Once a Catholic. Kathy Fucking Burke revives the story of Mary Mooney, Mary Gallagher and Mary McGinty, three girls going into their O'level year at Our Lady of Fatima, and trying to reconcile the daily diet of fire and brimstone dished out by the terrifying nuns, with the approaching 1960s in the outside world and their own growing sexualities. A strong cast goes some way to bringing O'Malley's once-outrageous comedy into the 21st century, although it's not an entirely successful enterprise.

Theatre review: Purple Heart

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The Gate invites the official reviewers in tomorrow night.

Pulitzer-winning Clybourne Park author Bruce Norris has a new play debuting at the Royal Court at the end of the month, but first one of his earlier plays gets its first UK showing courtesy of Christopher Haydon at the Gate. We're in a traverse again in Simon Kenny's design for Purple Heart, looking in on a typically beige 1970s living room, in some unnamed American suburb. A few months ago, Lars died in Vietnam. His alcoholic widow Carla (Amelia Lowdell) has been left to look after teenage son Thor (Oliver Coopersmith,) with the unwanted help of mother-in law Grace (Linda Broughton.) With Grace trying to thwart Carla's attempts to get hold of alcohol, their Saturday evening seems dramatic enough, but things take an odder turn at the arrival of what seems to be another person offering condolences: Purdy (Trevor White,) an old army buddy of Lars'.