Theatre review: The One

Ian had just turned the conversation - I'll leave you to guess if there was a gleeful tone to his voice - to the early closure of Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest musical, when the house lights went down and "Music of the Night" started to play. The love song from Phantom recurs over the next 75 minutes as the backdrop to another unhealthy relationship in Vicky Jones' The One. University lecturer Harry (Rufus Wright) and his long-term girlfriend - originally his student - Jo (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) are staying up throughout the night, waiting for news of Jo's sister, who's gone into labour. Prompted by a late-night visitor, the couple confront each other and their relationship, revealing it to be a viciously antagonistic one that seems to thrive on them permanently goading each other into obnoxious behaviour, and with a sexual power play that's uncomfortable to watch.

Theatre review: Fleabag

Fleabag needs a job, but the interview gets off to a bad start when she accidentally flashes her bra at her prospective boss - the fact that he's just been done for sexual harassment doesn't make him any less on edge. Phoebe Waller-Bridge performs her self-penned monologue Fleabag which, framed by the disastrous job interview, takes us back over how the 26-year-old woman ended up quite so chaotic. Following her best friend's death, Fleabag struggles to keep open the guinea pig-themed café they ran together. Her on-off boyfriend also walks out on her, possibly for good this time, and her first reaction is to start playing the field again as soon as possible. Waller-Bridge's hilarious play is an hour's journey through the world of a woman who approaches life and sexuality in ways we stereotypically expect of men.

Theatre review: Mydidae

DryWrite is a company that commissions playwrights to produce work on very specific briefs, and there's nothing dry about their challenge to Jack Thorne, to set a play entirely in a bathroom. Named after a kind of short-lived fly, Mydidae takes place over a day in the life of a couple, Marian (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and David (Keir Charles.) It starts as a fairly light piece that looks at how comfortable the pair are together, their morning peeing, flossing and shaving all done in front of each other, sharing a lot of in-jokes that suggest a couple who've got to know each other really well. But a darker underside becomes apparent - the day ahead is one they're both dreading, and it's not just because of the important business pitch David has to make: This is also the anniversary of an event which Thorne makes the audience aware of with a nice degree of subtlety.

Theatre review: Hay Fever

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This review is of a late preview - the penultimate one, I think.

Although unfortunately this felt more like the first or second preview than a show that's been in front of an audience for a week or so. The first Noël Coward play to be staged at this theatre since it was renamed in his honour, Hay Fever is a comedy of social awkwardness that's all about the carefully contrived artifice Coward is known for. The Blisses are an ostentatiously bohemian family, and this weekend they've got a full house: Each has invited a guest to stay without warning the others. Writer David Bliss (Kevin R McNally) has brought flapper Jackie (Amy Morton,) "retired" actress Judith (Lindsay Duncan) has invited Sandy (Sam Callis,) and their children Sorel and Simon (Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Freddie Fox) are putting up the older man and woman they have respective crushes on (Jeremy Northam and Olivia Colman.) But as the family start to trade partners over the course of the weekend, their guests aren't prepared for how much of the Blisses' lives are a performance.

There's an encouraging start as Bunny Christie's set is revealed, an airy country mansion in a state of disrepair, and the siblings' early bickering promises a witty, bitchy evening, but the more people who arrive on stage, the more sluggish the production gets. I'd been really looking forward to this largely for the sake of the female stars - Colman, Duncan and Waller-Bridge are all favourites of mine and they all give good performances. So do all the cast really but they never seem as if they've gelled as an ensemble. It's really only Fox and Waller-Bridge's relationship that I believed in. The second act is an improvement as the frantic parlour game that opens it creates some of the missing energy but it's always at risk of fading whenever the action slows down a bit. The final act is the shortest but also the messiest: A sudden lurch into slapstick is out of sorts with the rest of the play, and director Howard Davies hasn't pulled all its strands together - it's only at the end that the shape of this act becomes clear.

The clipped, exaggerated accents one associates with Coward were ditched in favour of something more naturalistic here and Jan thought this was the cause of the dialogue failing to spark. I'm not entirely in agreement as I fear the kind of cobwebby production we got for Blithe Spirit last year. But we did agree that there was certainly a major pacing issue - Jan described it as less Hay Fever, more Hay Slight Temperature. But I think he was just being clever to get name-checked in this review. I can't say any of the cast actually disappointed me, but the combination of them all just didn't work as well as I'd hoped.

Hay Fever by Noël Coward is booking until the 2nd of June at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.