Theatre review: A Tupperware of Ashes

The Dorfman's about to go dark for a while for another refurb, but it bows out for now in style with a show reminiscent of The Father, both in subject matter and in being something I was very glad to catch, but wouldn't want to put myself through again in a hurry. In Tanika Gupta's A Tupperware of Ashes Meera Syal plays Queenie, a name whose significance is obscure to start with, but which becomes clearer as Gupta gives us a loose reimagining of King Lear, charting the tragic mental breakdown of an independent, successful British-Bengali woman. Queenie is a chef with her own, recently Michelin-starred restaurant, although some of the things we learn about her success early on in the play come into question soon after: Her behaviour has started to change quite a lot, and her doctor daughter Kamala's (Natalie Dew) worst suspicions are confirmed when she sends her off for tests.

Theatre review:Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights

After last year's Metamorphoses, another winter's evening of adult - sometimes very adult - storytelling by candlelight at the Swanamaker. This time it's Hannah Khalil's take on the 1001 Nights, which she reimagines as much less of a one-woman show than it's usually seen as. For Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, Rosa Maggiora's set is a dungeon, comparatively comfortable with piles of cushions and plates of fruit but a prison nonetheless, where four women have been kept for so long they've lost track of time. When they're joined by a fifth, Fatah the Young (Alaa Habib,) they have to break it to the teenager that the marriage she's been preparing for isn't all it seems: When the King's first wife cheated on him, he vowed revenge on all women. He takes a new wife every night, and after some no-doubt-entirely-consensual sex, murders her. The plan is to eliminate every unmarried woman in his kingdom, and he's nearly done.

Theatre review: Approaching Empty

Ishy Din’s Approaching Empty takes place in 2013, specifically between the announcement of Margaret Thatcher’s death and her state funeral. It’s an on-the-nose framing for the story of two lifelong friends whose lives were largely defined by the dead sociopath’s policies: Mansha and Raf moved from Pakistan to Middlesbrough in the 1970s to work in a steelworks specialising in bridge-building, but in the ’80s Thatcher’s policies saw the factories close and the onus put on the workers to make their own way. Raf (Nicholas Khan) largely views this as a success, as he used his redundancy package to start a minicab business; it’s managed day-to-day by Mansha (Kammy Darweish,) who used his own redundancy to pay off his mortgage, but then spent the next thirty years stuck in a rut professionally. So when out of nowhere Raf expresses an interest in selling the business to a larger cab firm, Mansha finally sees an opportunity to be his own boss.