Theatre review: How the Other Half Loves

It's a cliché about farce that it relies heavily on characters running in and out of multiple doors, but most of Alan Ayckbourn's plays have premiered in the round. Maybe this is why he came up with his signature style of incredibly technically convoluted comedies that include conceits like time travel and multiple interlocking plays telling one big story. The latter, The Norman Conquests, was the first show to get the Old Vic specially reconfigured, and after quite a lengthy in-the-round season at the end of Matthew Warchus' tenure we get the playwright's return with How the Other Half Loves: This is the one whose high concept is multiple overlapping scenes, some taking place simultaneously, one 24 hours apart at two dinner parties - and in Phillip Breen's production, Rob Howell's design has the dinner tables literally overlap.

Theatre review: Double Feature

John Logan has written two major West End plays (plus wrangled the general madness of Moulin Rouge,) so a third is to be approached with a mix of excitement and trepidation, as I loved one of his previous plays and hated the other. Fortunately while his latest premiere isn't the instant classic that Red was, it also never threatens anything like the tedium of Peter and Alice. Logan is best-known as a screenwriter, and it's in the movies where he's found his inspiration for Double Feature. Particularly in the spiky relationships between actors and directors, as he gives us two pairings behind the scenes of famous movies: Anthony Ward's set is a dimly-lit Suffolk cottage, an authentically old building in the countryside that a studio has given young director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski) to stay in while he shoots the grisly 1967 horror movie Witchfinder General.

Theatre review: The Comedy of Errors(RSC / Barbican)

The RSC reopened last summer with the production that was in rehearsals when it had to close in 2020, minus its original star cast, and in a temporary venue designed to make the audience feel confident that they were getting adequate airflow: Phillip Breen's The Comedy of Errors premiered at an outdoor theatre in the RSC's gardens. This very different origin feels relevant as the production transfers to London and the sometimes unforgiving Barbican stage. This is the one with the two pairs of identical twins: Antipholus of Ephesus (Rowan Polonski) and his servant Dromio (Greg Haiste) have lived in Ephesus since they were babies, unaware that they arrived there shipwrecked, and that they each have an identical twin brother in Syracuse, coincidentally with the same names. The Syracuse pair were raised by their father Egeon (Antony Bunsee), so they do know about their brothers, and have been searching for them for some years.

Theatre review: The Hypocrite

2017 is the year of Hull as UK city of culture, and although they're based in Warwickshire the RSC have got in on the act, co-producing a new commission with Hull Truck Theatre. The city is at the heart of The Hypocrite, which although being written in the style of a Restoration comedy takes its story from true events from well before the Restoration, indeed before there was any need for a Restoration, as the titular character, Sir John Hotham (Mark Addy,) was the Governor of Hull in 1642, just as the Civil War was about to break out. His story was a scandal that put the city at the centre of the action, so it's natural that Hull's best and funniest living playwright should be chosen to tell it. But he must have been busy so they just got Richard Bean in to recycle some of the more successful bits from One Man, Two Guvnors.