Theatre review: The Sugar Syndrome

How do you evoke nostalgia for the fairly recent past? At the moment the sound of a dial-up modem does the trick very effectively, which is handy when the play is a revival of Lucy Prebble's first-produced play The Sugar Syndrome. That sound opening the show clues us in not just to its 2003 setting, but also to what must have been one of the first major plays to look at relationships formed online and, to start with at least, how you might not be getting quite what you were expecting. 17-year-old Dani (Jessica Rhodes) has been using chatrooms to meet people in real life, but some awkward fumbling (how does the props person make stage-jizz anyway, and how do they credit it on their CV?) with the smitten, awkward Lewis (Ali Barouti) turns out not to be exciting enough for her, and her next meeting is more unconventional and potentially dangerous: Pretending to be an 11-year-old boy, she befriends convicted paedophile Tim (John Hollingworth) and arranges to meet him IRL.

Theatre review: After October

"I can't imagine ever being able to laugh about any of this," says Rodney Ackland's author substitute. Which is actually one of the evening's better gags as After October is a play that does exactly that. Ackland ended up becoming one of the most popular West End playwrights of the mid-20th Century before falling back into obscurity, but this autobiographical play goes back to before his success: Clive Monkhams (Adam Buchanan) is a young writer who occasionally makes a living out of magazine articles, and has published three novels that nobody bought. But his big hopes lie with a play that's actually found a producer willing to stage it in a small West End theatre. It's 1936, and Clive lives in a basement flat with his mother Rhoda (Sasha Waddell,) a former actress who fostered a bohemian spirit in her children but, after her husband died penniless, can't actually afford for them all to maintain their lifestyle.

Theatre review: Laburnum Grove

After scoring a hit with Cornelius last year, the Finborough delves into J.B. Priestley's less-performed work again, although 1933's Laburnum Grove only gets the alternate treatment, running Sundays to Tuesdays. Suburbia had really started to come into existence between the wars, and despite the state of the economy some middle-class families were doing quite well for themselves and settling into comfortable neighbourhoods. One such family are the Radferns, led by the solid, dull George (Robert Goodale) and brisk Dorothy (Karen Askoe.) George always seems to have cash to spare, so Dorothy's sister Lucy and her husband Bernard (Lynette Edwards and Timothy Speyer) are frequent visitors. On one Sunday evening, Bernard asks for yet another loan, on the same night that George's daughter Elsie (Georgia Maguire) brings a young man home.