Theatre review: 'night, Mother

Marsha Norman's 1982 play is called 'night, Mother, because one of the cast is called Night, and the other one's Alicia Florick's mother. Its return to Hampstead Theatre, where it received its UK premiere, makes for another piece of evidence in my ongoing thesis that the Pulitzer is a booby prize as, despite the efforts of Roxana Silbert's production and its cast, it remains baffling to think the play itself is ever staged, let alone got singled out for a prestigious award. Set in a remote farmhouse, Jessie (Rebecca Night) moved back in with her mother after her divorce, supposedly to help look after her. But Thelma (Stockard Channing) seems very sprightly and capable, and as her daughter is very much aware, caring for her is essentially an excuse to try and keep her busy - Jessie has epilepsy which seems to have dominated her life, and the recent problems in her personal life have only made her retreat further from the world.

Theatre review: The Meeting

On the one hand, Andrew Payne's The Meeting is a pretty straightforward - and very effective - office sitcom, but on the other it's obvious from the start that it's going to deal with some pretty dark sexual politics. Somewhere fairly senior, but still a couple of floors away from the top, in an unnamed corporation, departmental head Stratton (Mark Hadfield) has been working for months on a project dreamt up by abrasive wunderkind Cole (nice to see Big Favourite Around These Parts Sam Swainsbury back on the London stage.) It's a Monday morning and they're ready to finalise a licensing deal with another company across the road but Jack, the man they've been in talks with, doesn't show up: Rumours are rife about him having had some kind of breakdown and being escorted off the premises. Instead the final deal is postponed to later in the week, with one of Jack's underlings taking over.

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya is Anya Reiss' third Chekhov adaptation with Russell Bolam at the helm, and hopefully that'll let her view it as a trilogy and return to her own original plays, which in the past have been rather good. (Although here's a fun game, see if you can spot the bit on the website where it actually says this was written by Anton Chekhov. It's there somewhere. Like Wally.) This is one of the Chekhov plays I've seen less often, and I've yet to see a production that convinced me of its greatness. Spoiler alert, but this production didn't either. John Hannah plays the titular Vanya, who's spent most of his life taking care of the farm owned by his late sister, and now passed on to her widower, the elderly academic Serebryakov (Jack Shepherd.) The latter has now retired and come back to the farm with his new young wife Yelena (Rebecca Night,) where he's not entirely welcome.

Non-review: Rough Cuts - Bytes

Not a review as this is the return of the Royal Court's occasional series of rehearsed readings and works-in-progress, Rough Cuts. This time around, established playwrights have been given the remit of touching on issues of technology and the internet. Jack Bence, Mandeep Dhillon, Malachi Kirby, Rebecca Night, Sarah Woodward and Al Weaver perform the four shorts collected as Bytes, performed in the Wilson Studio - a small rehearsal room behind Sloane Square tube station.

Alia Bano starts us off with a play set in a high school, where a handsome new teacher (Weaver) catches the eye of one of his students (Night.) There's a familiar story of accusation and rumours to be told but modern technology gives it a new twist: The girl suddenly has a naked photo of Mr Burns she says he sent her, but this happens to be just after she learned how to hack into locked Facebook accounts.