Theatre review: God of Carnage

I hadn't initially booked for the Lyric Hammersmith's revival of God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's follow-up to "Art" - I'd seen the original West End production of Christopher Hampton's translation, and remembered not being particularly fussed by it. A great cast made the difference when it was announced, and got me back to Reza's other story of insufferably upper-middle class people having a meltdown in a joylessly chic living room. Ladies and Gentlemen: The French. We're in Veronica (Freema Agyeman) and Michael Novak's (Martin Hutson) flat, where they're hosting Alan (Ariyon Bakare) and Annette Raleigh (Dinita Gohil) for the afternoon. The Raleighs' 11-year-old son Ferdinand has hit the Novaks' son Bruno with a bamboo cane in the school playground, knocking out two of his teeth.

Theatre review: The Hairy Ape

Eugene O'Neill fans are spoilt for choice in That London at the moment. As the title suggests, The Hairy Ape is more the beard-and-muscles at sea side of O'Neill's canon like last year's Anna Christie, than the domestic tragedy on offer in Long Day's Journey Into Night - even if both the muscles and the beard are slightly less extravagant than Jude Law's. An odyssey of the working man in the early days of trade unionism, The Hairy Ape follows Yank (Bill Ward,) a strong, not-too-bright man who works in the guts of a luxury transatlantic liner, shoveling coal into the furnaces. It's 1922, and the daughter of the ship's owner has patronising ideas of doing something for the less well-off. But when Mildred (Emma King) visits the boiler room, Yank scares her off. Told that she thought he was a "hairy ape" (and be warned, this is one of that weird sub-genre of plays that like to remind you of the title in the dialogue a lot) Yank cracks and ends up searching the streets of New York looking for some dignity, and a place to belong.