Theatre review: German Skerries

Time for another round of Robert Holman roulette: For a hugely influential playwright* he has one of the most understated styles imaginable. It means I don't like to miss his plays because on the right day they can be gently, powerfully moving; but it feels risky because on the wrong one you get something like the notoriously dull Making Noise Quietly. But I was also interested to see German Skerries if only because the Bush Theatre uses the script to wallpaper the urinals in the gents', so if nothing else I was familiar with the title. The titular German Skerries are a treacherous collection of rocks by the mouth of the River Tees, so named when a Luftwaffe pilot fell foul of them during World War II. By the late '70s when the play is set, they're mainly frequented by cormorants, so a nearby outcrop with a good view of the skerries is a popular spot for bird-watchers.

Theatre review: A Breakfast of Eels

I don't think I can be blamed for approaching Robert Holman's plays with a little trepidation. It's not the fact that they're largely impenetrable; but while his thoughtful poetic works can sometimes be moving there's always the risk that, like Making Noise Quietly, they'll tip over into the downright boring. Fortunately his latest work falls into the former category and is, for my money*, the most entertaining of his plays I've seen. Holman's written A Breakfast of Eels specifically for its two stars, and it's the second role he's tailor-made for Andrew Sheridan (the role of Jonah in Jonah and Otto, which Alex Waldmann recently played in the revival, was the first.) Sheridan has an older-than-his-years quality - I've always thought his face looks like it belongs in the 1940s - while Matthew Tennyson, whom Holman wanted to work with again after Making Noise Quietly, has the disconcerting quality of seeming like an overgrown child, to the point of playing Puck as a creepy toddler a couple of years ago.

Theatre review: Jonah and Otto

We first meet ageing clergyman Otto (Peter Egan, from the 1980s,) hugging a wall, but he's not the most unpredictable character in Robert Holman's Jonah and Otto. Somewhere in a seaside town, Otto is accosted by Jonah (Alex Waldmann,) a younger man pushing his six-week-old daughter in a supermarket trolley, and trying to get money by variously begging, stealing, and performing magic tricks. Despite having only just met, the two men seem to have become quickly invested in each other, and are soon questioning each other on not only their life stories, but also their deepest thoughts on life itself. Holman is a writer whose work I approach with a fair amount of trepidation - I found Making Noise Quietly oppressively boring, but there were parts of Across Oka I thought worked beautifully. On the surface Jonah and Otto is as wilfully oblique as the former play, but in Tim Stark's production at least I found it much more successful.

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - Across Oka

Word of mouth must have got out for the Royal Court's Playwright's Playwrights season of Friday afternoon readings at the Duke of York's, as its final installment was reasonably well-attended despite having probably the least starry cast of all the plays featured. The play itself might have been expected to keep people away as well, since David Eldridge is the last playwright asked to choose and direct one of the works that inspired him, and somewhat inevitably he's plumped for Robert Holman, whose Making Noise Quietly baffled, bored and irritated audiences in equal measure when it was revived at the Donmar a couple of months ago. The play Eldridge has chosen is another 1980s piece with themes of war at its heart, Across Oka, Holman's quietly tragic culture clash between East and West during the (by now thawing) Cold War.

Theatre review: Making Noise Quietly

Josie Rourke continues her first season at the Donmar with a show that links it to her previous theatre - Robert Holman's Making Noise Quietly premiered at the Bush in 1986, and director Peter Gill has worked at both theatres before. The play is a triptych, and in a programme note David Eldridge says its format directly influenced his own play Under The Blue Sky (which I liked, so I'll take that as a recommendation) and Simon Stephens' Wastwater (which I'm sure is also meant to be a recommendation but I don't think I know anyone who actually saw Wastwater who'd consider the comparison as a good thing.) Eldridge and Stephens also, of course, co-wrote A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky with Holman, and he seems to be a writer with a huge influence on other playwrights.