Theatre review: Bakersfield Mist

Kathleen Turner is no stranger to the West End, and her latest visit sees her take on a broken woman whose one remaining hope in life is tied up in an unlikely place. Lionel (Ian McDiarmid) is an authority on modern art whose career has seen his instincts rarely betray him, and who now works for an elite art institution, investigating potential forgeries. His latest job takes him to the unlikely venue of a trailer park in Bakersfield, California, and a woman whose usual taste in art extends to generic watercolours and drawings of clowns (a detailed set design from Tom Piper.) Turner plays Maude, who bought the ugliest painting she could find in a junk shop for $3, as a gag gift for a friend. Closer inspection, though, reveals that it could be a previously unknown Jackson Pollock, and Lionel's seal of approval could mean the difference between junk and millions of dollars in value.

Theatre review: Bracken Moor

Alexi Kaye Campbell seems a writer who's not afraid to play around with genre. His latest play, Bracken Moor, premiering at the Tricycle in a co-production with Shared Experience, is a meditation on economics and empathy. Though Campbell's political view is rather heavy-handedly incorporated into the narrative (I tend to agree with him but still found it unsubtle,) the format he's come up with is something I've never seen attempted before: Bracken Moor frames its politics in a ghost story. It's 1936, there's a financial crisis, and Harold Pritchard (Daniel Flynn) owns a lot of land in Yorkshire, including a number of coal mines. Ten years ago his young son Edgar died rather gruesomely, and while Harold has carried grimly on, his wife Elizabeth (Helen Schlesinger) has become a nervous, guilty wreck, staying secluded in their big gloomy house, wishing for death. But a decade on she has finally conceded to a visit from her oldest friend Vanessa (Sarah Woodward) and her husband Geoffrey (Simon Shepherd,) who used to be regular guests.