Theatre review: Breakfast at Tiffany's

This Christmas the RSC will be using a CGI projection to play Ariel in The Tempest, but if you can't wait that long to see a barely-humanoid homunculus on stage there's always Pixie Lott's performance as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In a weird coincidence, Nikolai Foster's touring production sets down in London for a few weeks at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, the same venue where a completely different adaptation of Truman Capote's novella (starring Anna Friel, like I just got home, Anna Friel) played only seven years ago. Without looking it up, I remember that as being a decent commercial if not particularly critical success, so I was a bit surprised to see it given another go with an untested "name" in the lead (there seems to be quite the rotating cast of actresses sharing the role for the regional dates, but just Lott for London.) An unnamed narrator whom Holly nicknames "Fred" (Matt Barber) tells the story of how, while much of America was focused on Europe and the Second World War, he moved to New York for the first time to try and make it as a writer.

Theatre review: The Dazzle

Inspired by a true story of a pair of wealthy brothers found starved to death in a mansion filled with junk, Richard Greenberg's The Dazzle gets a site-specific production from Simon Evans in the former Central St Martins School of Art in Charing Cross Road, rechristened Found 111. In early 20th century New York, Langley Collyer (Andrew Scott) is a renowned concert pianist blessed or cursed with incredibly acute senses and a memory that doesn't discard anything. So he can remember things he saw from his crib, and hearing a piece of music played even fractionally out of tune is like torture to him. It's made him wildly eccentric, and as his peculiarities have got worse his brother Homer (David Dawson) has given up his job as a lawyer. Ostensibly acting as Langley's accountant, he's actually more like his brother's carer, making sure he bathes, eats and turns up to his concerts, none of which he could necessarily be trusted to do of his own volition.

Theatre review: The American Plan

It's always nice when a play caters to my interests right from the start, like The American Plan does by opening with Luke Allen-Gale climbing out of a lake in bathing trunks, soaking wet. He eventually puts his clothes back on but Richard Greenberg's play soon compensates in other ways. It's July 1960 and Nick (Allen-Gale) is the son of an old wealthy New York family, holidaying with friends in the Catskills. Finding the resort's full schedule of "fun" oppressive, he swims across the lake to an odd-looking house owned by Eva (Diana Quick,) a Jewish refugee who escaped Germany on the last ship out, before her husband came up with a useful but unexciting invention that made their fortune. Nick is captivated by Eva's daughter Lili (Emily Taaffe,) a compulsive fantasist who enjoys teasing him with lies like how her late father's mysterious invention was a reversible condom.