Theatre review: The Green Bay Tree

Concluding the Jermyn Street Theatre's season reviving forgotten inter-war plays is one that could probably have done with being left forgotten. In Mordaunt Shairp's The Green Bay Tree, Dulcie (Richard Stirling) is a flamboyantly camp, vastly wealthy middle-aged aesthete who, twelve years ago, adopted an alcoholic's son as his ward. Now 23, Julian (Christopher Leveaux) has been raised to his mentor's lifestyle, so is barely-educated in anything other than flower-arranging and turning up fashionably late to the opera. So it's a shock to him to discover, on presenting his guardian with Leonora (Poppy Drayton,) that if he marries her Duclie will cut him off from his allowance. Reconnecting with his reformed father (Richard Heap,) Julian attempts to live a more frugal life and study so he can join Leonora's veterinary practice, but once the novelty wears off he finds luxury is hard to give up for long.

Theatre review: The Flouers o'Edinburgh

The Finborough is, surprisingly enough, the only London theatre to be marking the upcoming independence referendum in Scotland. It does so with the mini-season Scotland Decides/Tha Alba a'taghadh 2014, which has as its centrepiece a comic look at the social consequences of merging two nations who'd spent much of their history at war. First seen in 1948, Robert McLellan's The Flouers o'Edinburgh is set among the noble, if not as well-off as they used to be, denizens of Georgian Edinburgh. Girzie (Jenny Lee) has lost her lands and fortune, but finds solace in fiery niece Kate (Leigh Lothian.) Forbidding herself from marrying her good friend Sir Charles (Kevin McMonagle) until her brother returns from the army, Girzie puts her efforts intsead into finding a husband and stability for Kate. Sir Charles' son seems a perfect candidate, as he and Kate were good friends as children.

Theatre review: Gay's the Word

Occasionally the Finborough Theatre's Sunday-Tuesday shows get a further life, and so it is with Stewart Nicholls' production of Gay's the Word, now taking up residence at the Jermyn Street Theatre (which has replaced the ratty seating with something a bit comfier - although you still have to cross the stage to go to the loo.) Ivor Novello's final show attempts to blend his traditional operetta style with that of the American musicals that were pushing them out of theatres in the 1940s and '50s. And this theme feeds into the storyline, as the fading popularity of old-fashioned musical theatre spells trouble for Gay Daventry (Sophie-Louise Dann,) a stage star for the last 30 years, but now in dire financial straits after investing everything in a massive flop. Her co-star suggests she open her own drama school, but within months that too is struggling to make ends meet, and they may have to rely on some dodgy characters to bail them out.