Theatre review: It Walks Around The House At Night

Joe (George Naylor) is an out-of-work actor with a thing for posh boys, who's working in a bar when one of the regulars offers him a well-paid acting job - of sorts. David's nieces will be visiting the family's country pile for a week, and he's promised them an appearance from a resident ghost with a regular routine: It Walks Around The House At Night. One of the things about Tim Foley's ghost story that lets you know you're in (un)safe hands is the way he immediately wrong-foots the audience's mental image of what that title means - never setting foot inside the building, the ghost literally walks around the house, circling it in the surrounding dark woods. Joe is put up at a nearby lodge, asked to leave it only when dark falls and it's time to follow his assigned route through the trees.

Theatre review: Othello (National Theatre / Lyttelton)

Othello must be one of the most-frequently performed Shakespeare plays at the National Theatre, and the latest production by Deputy Artistic Director Clint Dyer - the first at the venue by a black director - is in part inspired by how long the version with Laurence Olivier in blackface continued to hold pride of place in the archive. That's one of the photos that adorn the back wall of the stage as the audience enters the Lyttelton, among an ever-changing projection display of past production posters that suggests the different approaches to the play taken over the years. As the display ticks past the years since it was written, we get the idea that we've reached a very 2022 reading, which strips the play back to show its racial conflicts as the primary motivator. Here, only Giles Terrera's General Othello isn't white; almost everyone in the rest of the cast doubles as a member of a sinister, black-shirted chorus Dyer has christened the System.

Theatre review: The Chairs

A rare appearance for Eugène Ionesco's absurdist work in a major London production - only the second in the decade I've been writing this blog - also features a more regular sight as Kathryn Hunter appears with husband and regular collaborator Marcello Magni in the first of two planned productions this year. At the Almeida Omar Elerian directs his own adaptation of Ionesco's The Chairs, and for the second show in a row here a revival gives an opportunity to address very modern concerns about climate change, as an impossibly elderly couple watch the world flood outside their windows, and remember a time when everything seemed brighter. But the Old Man (Magni) has a plan: He's been a janitor, or Master of the Mop and Bucket, all his life, but in his spare time he's been preparing and perfecting a speech that holds all the solutions to the world's problems. He doesn't feel able to deliver the message in front of an audience himself, but fortunately he's found a professional Speaker who can do it..

Theatre review: Pity

After the comparative triumph of writing the Olivier’s least-worst new play of 2017, Rory Mullarkey returns to the Royal Court where his somewhat disjointed style of playwriting goes up a notch to fully embrace Absurdism. Pity opens on a generic town square – it used to be the Market Square but there isn’t a market any more – where an ice cream stall has been set up, and Francesca Mills runs a tombola before the show starts. A man named only as Person (Abraham Popoola) starts to narrate his day – unemployed, he people-watches as it’s the only way to spend his time that doesn’t cost anything – and meets a Professor (Paul Bentall) who’s in the middle of a reactionary rant to his daughter when he’s struck by lightning and killed instantly. Person responds by proposing to Daughter (Sophia Di Martino) and the two marry without getting round to learning each other’s names.

Theatre review: Home Chat

I'm on the record as not being as convinced of Noël Coward's enduring genius as so many people seem to be, but that doesn't mean I haven't had some decent evenings at his plays - even, as it turns out, at one so little-regarded that it hasn't been seen on a London stage since its premiere in 1927. Home Chat is a light comedy about a lucky escape with an unexpected downside, and one surprisingly sympathetic to a woman with a mind of her own (there is the usual suggestion that women need a slap now and then to keep them in line because it's still Noël Coward and he's awful that way, but at least it's not done as a gag.) Martin Parr's production opens dramatically (thanks to lighting by Christopher Nairne and sound design by Pete Malkin) with a fatal train crash in France. One sleeper carriage is particularly wrecked, so much so that the miraculous escape of two English passengers makes the papers. But as Janet Ebony (Zoë Waites) was sharing the compartment with Peter (Richard Dempsey,) her friend since childhood but definitely not her husband, tongues quickly start to wag back home.

Theatre review: The Encounter

Simon McBurney writes, co-directs (with Kirsty Housley) and stars in The Encounter, an adaptation of Petru Popescu's book Amazon Burning, about a photographer whose search for a lost tribe ended up a lot more immersive than he'd planned. Loren McIntyre went into the rainforest with his camera in 1969, making sure to mark his way so he could get back again at the end of each day. That's until the day he actually spotted a member of the tribe, his caution left him and he ended up needing to put himself at their mercy for food and shelter. Having experienced only death and destruction at the hands of white men before, most of the tribe are hostile to him, but one man seems friendly and, despite their lack of a common language, McIntyre becomes convinced they're communicating telepathically.