Theatre review: Standing at the Sky's Edge

Thanks to its original run at Sheffield Theatres, Richard Hawley (music & lyrics) and Chris Bush's (book) Standing at the Sky's Edge had barely started playing at the National Theatre when it became the most-nominated musical at this year's Olivier Awards. Both venues it's played feel appropriate: Sheffield is the city its sprawling cast of characters call home; and now one of the most famous brutalist buildings in the country is a fitting place to house another surprisingly beloved concrete structure. In fact, when Ben Stones' design puts several floors of a Park Hill Estate tower block on the Olivier stage, it blends right into its surroundings. The band gets pride of place in a first-floor flat for a musical history of one specific home, where in three overlapping timelines, three generations of residents move in - starting with steelworker Harry (Robert Lonsdale) and his wife Rose (Rachael Wooding) in 1960, when the building is brand new.

Theatre review: Utility

Emily Schwend's Utility concludes another successful season at the Orange Tree, albeit one that's felt more quietly consistent than full of explosive hits. This, too, is in the same vein, an American kitchen sink drama about a woman just about keeping her head above water. The play starts with Amber (Robyn Addison) tentatively agreeing to let her husband Chris (Robert Lonsdale) move back in with her and their kids after a separation. It's implied, if never explicitly stated, that there was another woman, but in any case this doesn't seem to be what she's worried about: He's charming and well-meaning, but Chris is also unreliable and can barely seem to manage a couple of shifts at work every week, so Amber feels he'll end up being just another mouth to feed as she works two jobs. This week she's also got to worry about preparing an eighth birthday party for her daughter.

Theatre review: A Lie of the Mind

I'm still a long way from being a fan of Sam Shepard's work but I've been getting on a lot better with the plays that have been revived this year. They're still quintessentially American, and a focus on what it means to be an American man is at the heart of them, but like in Buried Child there's a wider scope of interest and an unsettling edge of the surreal to A Lie of the Mind. Initially appearing to be about domestic violence, it becomes a spiral of insanity as the violent, unpredictable drunk Jake (Gethin Anthony) arrives at his brother's house claiming that he's beaten his wife to death. In fact Beth (Alexandra Dowling) is still alive, but the attack has left her with brain damage. Jake, too, seems to be out of his mind, the extremity of his violence leading to a nervous breakdown. Both of them get taken back to their parents' homes to recover, but neither house is really a good place for anyone's mental health.

Theatre review: Plaques and Tangles

Plaques and Tangles are two kinds of formations in the brain that are thought to be responsible for Alzheimer's Disease; tangles are also a good description of how Nicola Wilson's play is structured, and not always in the way the playwright, and director Lucy Morrison intended. Megan (Monica Dola) is in her forties, and fast approaching the age at which her mother (Bríd Brennan) died, driving a car the wrong way down a motorway. She had a hereditary form of early-onset Alzheimer's, and as she starts to forget words and get her memories mixed up, it becomes increasingly obvious that Megan has inherited it. In fact, concerned about whether she had the gene, she took a test decades ago, but never told her husband Jez (Ferdy Roberts.)

Theatre review: From Here To Eternity

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Tim Rice says he doesn't believe in long preview periods, but his producers do so the official reviewers are being kept at bay until next week.

Although based on a novel by James (not Earl) Jones, the film of From Here To Eternity is so well-known it probably qualifies Tim Rice's new musical as the latest in the movie-to-musical trend. Rice has teamed up with composer Stuart Brayson to tell the story of US soldiers stationed in Hawaii in late 1941, knowing that they're bound to be joining World War II sooner or later but not realising the incident that draws America in will come to them directly. In the meantime they're in a limbo state with little to occupy their time. Newcomer Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Robert Lonsdale) is a boxer who no longer boxes, a bugler who no longer blows the bugle, and uninterested in casual sex, which marks him out as different to the other soldiers. He falls in love with Lorene (Siubhan Harrison,) a prostitute who's also uninterested in casual sex, which marks her out out as a woman who makes poor career choices.

Theatre review: A Life

The Finborough used to be a pub theatre, then it was a pub theatre without a pub attached, then a wine bar theatre. Now it's a wine bar theatre without a wine bar attached, as yet another business on the ground floor unfortunately goes under. Upstairs though the theatre continues, touch wood, to thrive with another full house, for another of its "lost" classics - although in this case, apparently Hugh Leonard's memory play A Life is fairly regularly revived in its native Ireland, if not here. Desmond Drumm (Hugh Ross) is a couple of months away from retirement, but he won't get to enjoy it: He's told his wife that he's been diagnosed with an ulcer, but in reality he's been given less than six months to live. When he visits his estranged friend Mary to make up, it sets off memories of his youth, and we see him in his twenties (David Walshe,) the mistakes he made then - and the ones he continues to make even now with time running out.