Theatre review: The Gift

Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park is about to get a London revival but before then the Theatre Royal Stratford East jumps in with a new play that feels very much like a British response to that play: Both deal with racism in their respective countries by contrasting a story from the past with one in the present, and tackle a very real and serious matter through the surprisingly successful medium of a sharp comedy of embarrassment. And if there were any doubt that Janice Okoh's The Gift was a British play, the action centres on three excruciating tea parties. In the first two acts two black British women, both called Sarah, living over a century apart, are preparing for trips to Nigeria they don't really want to go on: Based on a real historical figure, Sarah Bonetta Davies (Shannon Hayes) was a Yoruba princess captured by enemies as a child, only to be rescued and given as a gift to Queen Victoria, who considered herself her adopted mother (although she largely packed her off to be raised by someone else.)

Theatre review: Somersaults

Russell Bolam directed my top show of 2012, and he kicks off 2013 with an English premiere, Iain Finlay Mcleod's Somersaults. The main show at the Finborough, it shares with the venue's current alternate show a Scottish lead character with Scots Gaelic as his first language, but is a very different, and in many ways even odder, creature. When he first reconnects with old university friend Mark (Simon Harrison) via Facebook, James (David Carlyle) seems to have it all: Thanks to a canny discovery and good investments, he's got a lot of cash and free time, which he's used to fill the Hampstead flat he and wife Alison (Emily Bowker) share with lots of desirable stuff. But his finances aren't what he thought they were, and soon an unusually posh bailiff, Barrett (Richard Teverson) turns up and his belongings and home are gone, with Alison not far behind.