Theatre review: Abigail's Party

Mike Leigh's name might always be brought up in relation to a kind of bleak, gritty realism, but it's his 1977 black comedy Abigail's Party that remains his most famous, beloved, and frequently-revived play. Of course we never see Abigail or her party - that's going on a few doors down in a street in suburban Essex. Instead we're at what's meant to be a much more sophisticated, adult soirée at the home of Beverley (Tamzin Outhwaite) and Laurence (Kevin Bishop,) who've asked round new neighbours Angela (Lauren Patel) and Tony (Omar Malik) to welcome them to the neighbourhood. An awkward fifth wheel in the group is Abigail's mother Sue (Pandora Colin,) who's been invited along so she can escape the teenage chaos going on in her own house. But with Beverley in charge things don't stay much calmer here for long.

Theatre review: Cow | Deer

Katie Mitchell has been noticing that Foley art is a thing that exists, and building shows around it, on and off for years now. To be honest I probably wouldn't have booked Cow Vertical Bar Deer, which Mitchell co-creates with Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson, if it hadn't been a co-production with the National Theatre of Greece and I'd not felt like being supportive. In the end it's not quite my cup of tea but didn't feel like a waste of my time either. The show is entirely wordless, with the cast of four responding to Wilson's pre-recorded soundtrack of animal and machine noises by using Foley techniques to create the rest of the sounds heard by the titular animals: A heavily pregnant cow in a field, and in a nearby wood a deer, whose levels of fecundity the informational postcard we're given at the start doesn't disclose.

Theatre review: Dear Octopus

An obscure rediscovery seems to have been a hit at the Lyttelton as Emily Burns directs Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus, a sprawling family drama set over the weekend of Dora (Lindsay Duncan) and Charles Randolph's (Malcolm Sinclair) golden anniversary. The sort of family who describe themselves as ordinary because they don't have a coat of arms, they assemble at the large country house built by Charles' grandfather. Over the weekend we see four generations of the family who've been raised in this house - three of them by the same nanny. Of the couple's six children four survive - the eldest son died in the First World War, while one daughter died of undisclosed causes. The others juggle various successes and neuroses: Margery (Amy Morgan) is trying to control her warring children, Hilda (Jo Herbert) manages to balance a successful job as an estate agent with her OCD, and Cynthia (Bethan Cullinane) works for a Paris fashion house, although rumour has it she's been in France for so long because she's concealing a scandal in her personal life.

Theatre review: Antigone

The Open Air Theatre's set designers seem to have gone for a thematic progression over the 2022 season: For Legally Blonde the set was pink, for 101 Dalmatians it was made up of the characters in the show's title; so for the concluding production, Leslie Travers gives us the title of the show... in pink letters. The name Antigone is spelt out in graffiti-like letters that form a skate park, as Inua Ellams' adaptation of Sophocles is not just a modern-dress one but essentially a complete reworking of the myth. So we open at a London youth centre where Antigone (Zainab Hasan) volunteers, alongside sister Ismene (Shazia Nicholls) and brother Polyneices (Nadeem Islam.) Their oldest brother Eteocles (Abe Jarman) has recently joined the police, and after an introduction that sets up the siblings' contrasting personalities we skip forward a few years during which Polyneices disappears. It turns out he's gone to Syria where he's been radicalised; when he returns as part of a terrorist attack, both he and his brother end up dead on opposite sides of the conflict.

Theatre review: Bach & Sons

The Bridge Theatre's large, easily flexible auditorium, together with Nicholas Hytner's contacts meaning he could quickly bring in many small-scale shows that could play to diminished capacity without breaking the bank, meant that during 2020's two false starts coming out of lockdown it became my most visited venue. The socially distanced seating remains but the programming has gone back to business as usual, with a play that allows Simon Russell Beale to combine his acting day job with his side hustle presenting documentaries about choral music. In Nina Raine's Bach & Sons he plays Johann Sebastian Bach, the most successful and best-remembered of many generations of composers, although in the years covered by the play that doesn't look like it'll be the case: He correctly predicts that his death will be a great career move as he'll get reevaluated, but at the time his meticulous, mathematical musical style is going out of fashion.

Theatre review: Our Town

Our Town is American theatre's archetypal metatheatrical play, and for anyone not sure what that means Ellen McDougall's staging provides a pretty strong hint: Rosie Elnile's set puts a miniature version of the Open Air Theatre's seating banks on the stage, reflecting the audience's place back at them. It's an inspired setting for a story that's so much about people sitting back and observing life, although that significance isn't revealed until late. For the first two acts Thornton Wilder's play is pointedly about the everyday as it follows life in the 1900s and early 1910s in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. In particular two families - that of Dr (Karl Collins) and Mrs Gibbs (Pandora Colin) and their next-door neighbours, local newspaper editor Mr Webb (Tom Edden) and his wife (Thusitha Jayasundera.) Narrated by the Stage Manager (Laura Rogers,) the first act follows a decidedly ordinary day.

Theatre review: The Dark Earth and the Light Sky

I'm all for giving people second chances, and at £8 for the Almeida's behind-a-pillar obstructed view seats, it's not as big a gamble as it might be. Because while the National's adaptation of Frankenstein was one of last year's biggest theatrical blockbusters, you'd be hard pushed to find someone who thought Nick Dear's script (o we are poor but happy and in love i do hope a monster doesn't suddenly turn up and kill us how tragically ironic that would be) was a factor in its success. Dear's new play has to make do without the bells and whistles of the Olivier's stage, star casting and direction. Instead The Dark Earth and the Light Sky rocks up at the Almeida with a pretty bare stage, Bob Crowley's design giving us an earth-covered playing area, conjuring up perhaps the native British soil in whose defence the early 20th century poet Edward Thomas enlisted in WWI, ultimately leading to his death.

Theatre review: The House of Bernarda Alba

I do like to pick something spectacularly unromantic for my Valentine's Day viewing. I'm not sure anything can beat The Shape of Things last year, but The House of Bernarda Alba, the classic of violently repressed sexuality, fits the bill well enough. Bijan Sheibani has moved the action of Lorca's play to a remote part of Iran, possibly in the present day - in any case we see the maid vacuuming early on, so we know it can't be too far in the past. I know no more about Muslim mourning rituals than I do about the original's Catholic ones, but for me at least this contemporary setting worked well enough, and makes the play a reminder that oppression of women isn't exclusively a thing of the past. Bernarda Alba (most of the other characters have had their names changed to something more suitably Iranian but the matriarch's stays the same) has just buried her second husband, and commands her household of five daughters to observe 8 years of mourning which will see them imprisoned in their own home. The only hope of escape is a suitable marriage (and wealthy landowner Bernarda's definition of "suitable" is cripplingly narrow in their small, mostly-poor village.) Oldest daughter by her first husband, Asieh (Pandora Colin) has her own fortune, which has caught the eye of an eligible young local. But everyone except the matriarch can see his real interest is in youngest, prettiest daughter Adela (Hara Yannas.) The hunchbacked Elmira (Amanda Hale) is also hopelessly in love with him, and if she can't have him she'll try and make sure nobody does.