Theatre review: Andy Capp The Musical

Taking its cue from the success of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, a British comic strip got in on the game of trying a musical spin-off; the unlikely team of Alan Price from The Animals (music and lyrics) and Trevor Peacock from The Vicar of Dibley (book and lyrics) came up with Andy Capp The Musical in 1982. It did make it to the West End but presumably not for long, as it becomes the latest "forgotten" British musical to get a revival as the Finborough's alternate show. Roger Alborough plays Reg Smythe's famous creation Andy Capp, the permanently unemployed layabout who still seems to find the money to get drunk every night. Andy's wife Flo (Lynn Robertson Hay) is the one with a job, but she still has to beg him for money if she wants to go to bingo, or to buy something special - like a new dress for a wedding.

Theatre review: Chicken Dust

The conditions in which animals meant for cheap food are raised are something we probably wouldn't want to think about too much; but Ben Weatherill's play Chicken Dust isn't so much about the birds themselves, as about how the lives of the people who work there aren't much more fun than those of the doomed chickens. A student who's had to grab the first job going when his father gets ill, Tim (Christopher Hancock) arrives at a Leicestershire farm that's been taken over by a large corporation. Chicks that have been hatched elsewhere are transported there to be raised and fattened up in a barn, and when they're ready for slaughter it's his job to catch them. He joins a team two of whom, Freddie (Roger Alborough) and Val (Paddy Navin) had their own farms before falling on hard times and having to sell out to the same sort of company that now pays them minimum wage.