Theatre review: Gypsy

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This Chichester transfer hasn't opened to London critics yet.

Something of an origin story for Gypsy Rose Lee, the world's most famous striptease artist, Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's Gypsy is one of those perennial Broadway classics that doesn't get revived quite as often in the West End. Lara Pulver plays Louise Hovick, who would grow up to become the infamous title character, but the undoubted focus of the show is the pushiest of all pushy stage mothers, Momma Rose (Future Dame Imelda Staunton.) Rose tours around the US with a vaudeville show led by youngest daughter June (Gemma Sutton,) trading on a cutesy child act well into her teens. With the movies making vaudeville a thing of the past, June becomes disillusioned as the audiences dry up and elopes with one of her backing singers, Tulsa (Dan Burton.) The show can't possibly go on - unless you're Momma Rose and unwilling to admit defeat.

Theatre review: The Vertical Hour

Like Skylight, David Hare's The Vertical Hour sees him pit political ideologies against each other in the middle of a complicated personal relationship, in a conversation that runs on well into the night. In this 2006 play though, the political subject - the Iraq War - is made clear from the outset. Nadia (Thusitha Jayasundera) used to be a war correspondent, but after her time in Sarajevo moved back to America, settling at Yale as a politics lecturer. The play is bookended by seminars with two of her students (Cameron Cuffe, Pepter Lunkuse,) who like many have a degree of undisguised contempt for her support of the "liberation" of Iraq. Her views are so high-profile she's been invited to advise George W. Bush in person, and she can't escape discussion of the subject even when she goes on holiday with her English boyfriend Philip (Finlay Robertson) to meet his (now-divorced) parents.