Theatre review: Reykjavik

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I caught Reykjavik's final preview performance before they invite the press in.

Add Richard Bean to the ever-growing list of playwrights who really just want to write a ghost story: It's fair to say I've had mixed reactions to his plays, but while the writer's biggest hits have been with comedy, the mournful, haunted Reykjavik is probably the best of his plays that I've seen. Set in 1976, with the Cod Wars (Iceland demanding, and invariably getting, an increasingly large area of exclusivity for fishing its waters) nearing their end, the fishing industry that makes up a huge proportion of Hull's economy looks under serious threat. But for Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth,) whose company owns several boats, there's a more immediate problem: One of his trawlers has sunk in the freezing waters off Iceland, and all but four of the crew are dead. It's something all the trawlermen know is a possibility, and the city has traditions for dealing with it.

Theatre review: The Cord

Writer-director Bijan Sheibani has worked with Irfan Shamji multiple times before, so you can see why he'd take advantage of that working relationship to cast the extraordinary actor in his latest play as well, putting him at the centre of an intense mental breakdown in The Cord. It's an evening that put me in mind of The Father, in the sense that it's a brilliant evening of theatre I'm glad I caught, but not necessarily one I'd want to put myself through again. Ash (Shamji) is a new father, whose wife Anya (Eileen O'Higgins) is still recovering from a birth with some complications, but apart from the inevitable lack of sleep is largely settling into her new life, and bonding with the baby. Ash seems to feel slightly excluded from their new group, but it's only after his mother Jane (Lucy Black) visits that this seems to tip over into a more serious mental condition.

Theatre review: Pass Over

Over the years I've come to trust Indhu Rubasingham's judgement, which is the only reason I would book for a play whose blurb compares it to Waiting for Godot - especially so soon after putting myself through some actual Beckett again. Antoinette Nwandu's play about the ongoing epidemic of black Americans being shot by police turns the pair of tramps into homeless African-Americans living under a railway bridge, their inability to move from the spot not down to abstract existential dread but the very specific knowledge that anyone who tries to get away gets gunned down. Paapa Essiedu plays Moses, whose name, like the play's title Pass Over, references the other overt influence on Nwandu's play, the biblical book of Exodus, and while Moses himself often despairs, his friend Kitch (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) has faith that he can lead his people to a Promised Land.