Theatre review: A Good House

If the Royal Court Upstairs has a history of making you feel very nervous about any play featuring a baby, the main Downstairs theatre can give you déjà vu with a satire on race relations set firmly in the suburbs, whose communities appear happily integrated on a surface that's easily scratched away. If Clybourne Park had over fifty years of history to play with, Amy Jephta's A Good House deals with a place where the very first roots of racial integration are only three decades old: The aptly-named Stillwater is an affluent new-build suburb of Johannesburg, where Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) were early buyers, and two years on remain the only black residents. Meanwhile, yoga instructor Jess (Robyn Rainsford) and her husband Andrew (Kai Luke Brummer) moved in a couple of months ago, paying a much higher price which means all their money is now tied up in the house.

Theatre review: A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man was famously made into a film a few years ago, best known for starring Colin Firth and Nicholas Hoult in his pants. Now the Park Theatre's main house plays host to a stage adaptation by Simon Reade, and while the white pants are ably filled, the Firth-shaped hole proves harder to ignore. The story is a day in the life of a fifty-something English academic who teaches literature at a California university. His last day on earth, in fact, as foreshadowed in Philip Wilson's production when we first meet George (Theo Fraser Steele) asleep in his bed, lying flat on his back under a white sheet as if on a slab. It's less than a year since his boyfriend died in a car accident, and George is still adapting to being single again; we see him fill his day with work, friends and bars, in between memories of his lost love.

Theatre review: Masterpieces

Anger can be a spur to some powerful writing, but while anger over the relationship between pornography and misogyny is more than justifiable, I’ve yet to see it be the basis of a coherent piece of theatre. The Finborough proves that #MeToo isn’t the first time theatre has fought back against the oppression of women by dusting off Sarah Daniels’ 1983 play Masterpieces, which tries to trace a line from misogynistic jokes all the way to the murder of women. It starts promisingly enough with the standard dinner party from hell: Olivia Darnley and Edward Killingback (Yeah!) Them Motherfuckers Don’t Know How To Act (Yeah!) play Rowena and Trevor, whose dinner with friends and family degenerates into a series of sexist jokes. This scene actually contains some really good moments about the way men silence women, that could have come straight out of the Q&A scene in The Writer – like Yvonne (Tessie Orange-Turner) being asked why she hasn’t said much, and having Trevor jump in to answer for her that she hasn’t been able to get a word in edgeways.

Theatre review: Ugly Lies the Bone

Lindsey Ferrentino's Ugly Lies the Bone is a play for only five actors - one of whom stays offstage almost throughout - looking at a domestic situation. There's a reason it's landed on the big Lyttelton stage at the National though, and that's because it also encompasses a much larger world, albeit a virtual one. Jess (Kate Fleetwood) has returned from her third tour in Afghanistan after getting caught in an IED explosion, with horrific burns that cover half her face and much of her body. She's in constant pain and coming back to where she grew up doesn't even have the comfort of familiarity: Her Florida town's economy was based around space shuttle launches, but with NASA ending the programme the town has dried up, jobs are scarce and it's becoming a ghost town. Her mother is now in a nursing home with dementia, and Jess refuses to visit her because she's afraid she won't recognise her.

Theatre review: Pig Girl

It seems like at least half the theatre bloggers in London are still eagerly awaiting the return of Armstrong's War, which far too few people got the chance to see in 2013; in the meantime we can make do with the Finborough giving over its Sunday-Tuesday slot to another Colleen Murphy play. Pig Girl is a much darker affair though: In Zoe Hammond's design, to stage left and right we have a Sister (Olivia Darnley) on the phone to a Police Officer (Joseph Rye) about the disappearance of her troubled younger sister. She's not the first drug-addicted prostitute to go missing from Vancouver and rumours of a serial killer have been rife for years, but there hasn't been a single piece of physical evidence so the police can't even officially open an investigation. These phone calls to the police take place over several years, during which time a picture slowly starts to build of what's happening to the missing women.

Theatre review: Wolf Hall

I haven't read Hilary Mantel's double Booker-winning historical novels about Thomas Cromwell (I wasn't too fond of her Beyond Black a few years ago, so wasn't tempted by her more recent literary blockbusters.) Theatre, of course, is always much easier to tempt me with, so the RSC bringing the court of Henry VIII to their smaller Swan stage was intriguing (and, even with the train journeys factored in, quicker than reading the books.) I'm watching each show on its own, so first up is Wolf Hall, in which we join Cromwell (Ben Miles) as the trusted, but still lowly, lawyer in the service of the Lord Chancellor Cardinal Wolsey (Paul Jesson.) We're a couple of decades into Henry's reign, which means he's unhappy about Catherine of Aragon's failure to bear him a male heir - and starting to look at alternatives.