Theatre review: Spring Awakening

DISCLAIMER: Drama school productions are classed as amateur performances; but as ever, I try to treat them the same as I would professional ones as that's what the cast will be aiming to do next.

It's been a while since I went to one of LAMDA's public performances, and I've not seen them do a musical before, but Vanessa wouldn't have forgiven me if we'd missed a chance to see one of her absolute favourites, Spring Awakening. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's Broadway musical takes Frank Wedekind's famously banned 19th century play and plays it pretty well straight in the spoken-word scenes, adding deliberately anachronistic songs revealing what the kids are really thinking. Melchior (Ross Kugman tonight - two casts alternate between performances) is the first of his classmates to find out about sex, and only because he reads about it in a book. Apart from those Melchior informs himself, the others remain completely unaware as their parents refuse to discuss it. In the case of his girlfriend Wendla (India Shaw-Smith,) her mother's painfully coy description of the facts of life leads to tragedy. Other kids suffering include the resident loser Moritz (Soroosh Lavasani,) whose parents will disown him if he fails, which his teachers are determined he will.

Theatre review: Jane Wenham, the Witch of Walkern

You don't see a lot of theatre about witch-hunts - presumably because Arthur Miller's The Crucible is so widely regarded (if not necessarily by me) as a masterpiece, that anything else would be held up to comparison. It's not put off Rebecca Lenkiewicz though, as she not only revisits the paranoia in Jane Wenham, the Witch of Walkern, she also finds a new and bitingly topical metaphor in the theme: Society's poor, old and disabled being demonised, scapegoated and ultimately disposed of. The village of Walkern in Generic Rural Accentshire saw its share of witch trials and executions in the 17th century, and decades later, when everyone thinks things are calming down, they flare up again. As the play opens a woman has just been hanged as a witch, leaving behind a distressed and sexually confused daughter, Ann (Hannah Hutch.)

Theatre review: Albion

Former social worker Chris Thompson only had his first play Carthage staged earlier this year, but with the second he's already experimenting with form in a way many more experienced playwrights rarely do. Inspired by an image from a far-right rally in which a rainbow flag was among the banners, Albion looks at the insidious ways extremists make their ideas seem more palatable. Jayson (Tony Clay) runs the karaoke at his brother's pub, The Albion, in Tower Hamlets. As well as being the landlord, Paul (Steve John Shepherd) is the leader of a right-wing party, the English Protection Army. They're seen as racist thugs by the media, and ever since his soldier sister Poppy (Nicola Harrison) was killed in Afghanistan, the ranks have been harder to control - especially his deputy Kyle, who was Poppy's boyfriend. But he himself is part of Paul's plan to make the EPA look inclusive: Kyle (Delroy Atkinson) is black; and Jayson is openly gay.

Theatre review: Mad About the Boy

Gbolahan Obisesan's playlet Mad About the Boy offers a short, sharp look at the current generation of teenagers and centres on the idea of respect: Dad (Jason Barnett) belongs to a generation who believed you should give respect; his Boy (Bayo Gbadamosi) belongs to one that demands it categorically. Somewhere between them is Man (Simon Darwen,) who says his generation earned their respect. Man is the school counselor, earnestly trying to help the Boy whose behaviour is getting increasingly out of control; his single father seems to be just as much in need of help to figure out what the hell to do with his son. Obisesan gives us a series of scenes between two or all three of the men, employing a risky form of dramatic poetry that sees the cast speedily alternating short lines, a technique with the potential to go horribly wrong.