Theatre review: Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew

If there was a touch of damning with faint praise to me calling Otherland "nice" a couple of days ago, the term feels as appropriate, but without the backhanded element, for Coral Wylie's gentle family drama Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew. As families go it's an eccentric quartet, in that the member with perhaps the biggest influence over the others has been dead for decades. In Debbie Hannan's production Wylie also plays Pip, who came out as bisexual to their parents a little while ago to little drama, but whose more recent coming out as non-binary still has Lorin (Pooky Quesnel) and especially Craig (Wil Johnson) struggling to get used to. To Pip this all blends in with their general feelings about their parents being rather distant and uncommunicative; Craig tends to disappear to his allotment, which they're vaguely aware has some connection to his dead best friend Duncan.

Theatre review: The Suicide

2016 definitely likes its comedy dark, and after the serious version as the Almeida used the moving (literally) Boy to look into a young man feeling disenfranchised in modern Britain, the National takes the same subject and plays it for big laughs. Suhayla El-Bushra's The Suicide is an adaptation of a controversial Stalin-era Russian satire by Nikolai Erdman, and sees Javone Prince's affable everyman Sam Desai frustrated after five years without a job, his wife Maya (Rebecca Scroggs) having to support them both, and the two living in her mother Sarah's (Ashley McGuire) flat. When he tries to help a friend he ends up late for the Job Centre, meaning he has his benefits sanctioned and, feeling completely useless, goes to the top of his tower block in the middle of the night, toying with the idea of jumping off.