Theatre review: The Line of Beauty

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Oh no wait, it says Beauty.

  

Actor Jack Holden's second career as a playwright is really picking up steam this year, and after his breakthrough Cruise you can see why the Almeida might go to him to adapt Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 Booker-winner The Line of Beauty, another story of hedonistic gay life in the early '80s beginning to be haunted by the spectre of AIDS. But here the way the politics of Thatcherism tied into and affected that pandemic is even more explicit: In 1983, middle class Oxford graduate Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot) is transferring to London for a PhD, where he moves in with the family of his best friend Toby (Leo Suter.) His father Gerald (Charles Edwards) is a newly-elected Tory MP, tipped to rise quickly in Thatcher's government. The lodger is welcomed into the family, although there's a tacit understanding that he's expected to repay this by acting as a babysitter for Toby's sister Cat (Ellie Bamber,) who's bipolar and self-harms.

Theatre review: The Truth

Prolific French writer Florian Zeller is fast becoming ubiquitous on the London stage; after the pairing of The Father and The Mother took a dark and moving look at crumbling minds and crumbling relationships, a change of tack with a much lighter look at rocky marriages in The Truth (which also has a companion play, and I imagine we'll see The Lie here too soon enough.) For the last six months Michel (Alexander Hanson) has been having an affair with Alice (Frances O'Connor,) the wife of his best friend Paul (Robert Portal.) They've been meeting in the afternoons in a hotel room, but things get derailed as it seems Paul and Michel's wife Laurence (Tanya Franks) might have cottoned on to the affair. Alice thinks they should just confess all to their spouses but Michel thinks they can brazenly style it out - presumably not realising just how bad a liar he is.

Theatre review: Communicating Doors

Ever since we saw the Old Vic's production of The Norman Conquests in 2008, Vanessa has been an Alan Ayckbourn fan, and as you can pretty much put money on there being at least one production of his plays a year, it's ended up reliably being my birthday present to her. But while she's continued to love the plays, for me there's been seriously diminishing returns. So maybe my expectations were low, but it turns out Communicating Doors is the Ayckbourn I've enjoyed the most since that first trip. Perhaps it's the fact that, while still recognisably Ayckbourn in many ways, the play has quite a different feel to it to the domestic comedies I've been used to in the last few years. It's a very English take on a time travel adventure as, in the year 2020, dominatrix Phoebe (Rachel Tucker) travels through a riot-torn London, past where Big Ben used to be, to meet a wealthy old client in a five-star hotel.

Theatre review: Grand Guignol

I described 'Tis Pity She's a Whore last night as grand guignol, but here's a play that looks back at the theatre that put that phrase into the vocabulary. Carl Grose's comedy Grand Guignol arrives at Southwark Playhouse from Plymouth in time for Hallowe'en, and despite being played for laughs rather than scares, comes with enough gore and splatter to live up to the name. It's the early days of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris, and impresario Max Maurey (Andy Williams) has scored a hit with his formula: An evening of short horror plays, each crammed with madness and violence, and invariably culminating in gory murder and dismemberment. Lead actors Mlle Maxa (Emily Raymond) and Paulais (Robert Portal) have become stars, and the pressure is on writer Andre De Lorde (Jonathan Broadbent) to come up with even bigger extremes for the next season.

Theatre review: This Was A Man

Among the plays the Finborough unearths that haven't been performed for decades, there's the odd one that hasn't been performed at all, at least not in this country. That's how they can produce the UK premiere of a play by a beloved, long-dead author: Noël Coward's This Was A Man was banned in 1925 for its flippant approach to marital infidelity, and ended up getting its first outing on Broadway instead. By the time the Lord Chamberlain's office had lost the power to ban plays, this one was long-forgotten, so Belinda Lang's is the first production to dig it up in decades. Edward (Jamie De Courcey) is an artist who's started to get some success with his portraits of society women in uncomfortable poses (it makes them feel like they've got their money's worth.) But he's not happy, because his wife Carol (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) has been carrying out a string of affairs, often in public.

Theatre review: The Doctor's Dilemma

While a lot has been written about the topicality of a play being revived in the Olivier (Timon of Athens, which I won't be seeing until next week,) the National's middle stage is also playing host to a classic play with a lot of current relevance. The Doctor's Dilemma, which has just opened at the Lyttelton, is Bernard Shaw's look at the medical profession, and in particular the dangers that private medicine (which we seem to be steadily being pushed back towards) can hold. The title does what it says on the tin: Sir Colenso Ridgeon is a Harley Street doctor with a cure for tuberculosis that's still in the trial stages but which he thinks will guarantee success. Limited funds mean he can only treat ten patients, and he has to decide who gets the last available place: Selfless, generous but unremarkable Dr Blenkinsop (Derek Hutchinson,) who's treated the poor for years while his own health fails; or Louis Dubedat, a talented artist with an appalling personality.