Theatre review: Fireface

The James Menzies-Kitchin Award returns for a second year to its current home in the Young Vic's Clare auditorium, where this year's winner Sam Pritchard has chosen to revive Marius von Mayenburg's Fireface, in a translation by Maja Zade. A twisted look at the frustrations and raging hormones of adolescence, von Mayenburg's play takes us into the home of a disfunctional family, whose laissez-faire parents are unwilling or unable to see how far their children's angst differs from the norm. Olga (Aimeé-Ffion Edwards) is impatient to leave her childhood behind, and when her younger brother, pyromaniac Kurt (Rupert Simonian,) starts to have his own sexual awakening, she decides to take a more hands-on approach to educating him in such matters than is usual for a sister. When an outsider breaks into the siblings' private world, Kurt's love of fire and explosions reaches a new level.

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: Three Kingdoms

Simon Stephens' last premiere in this country, The Trial of Ubu, was notable for how much director Katie Mitchell's stylistic choices overshadowed Stephens' play as written. For the playwright's latest, Three Kingdoms, he once again puts a lot of faith in his director, in a multicultural production - the British writer is paired with a German director (Sebastian Nübling,) Estonian designer (Ene-Liis Semper) and a cast from all three countries (Estonians make up the majority of the cast, although English is the most-spoken language, with the rest surtitled.) The story appears at first to be a hard-boiled crime drama, as detectives Ignatius Stone and Charlie Lee (Nicolas Tennant and Ferdy Roberts) interrogate Tommy (Rupert Simonian,) a young man caught on CCTV trying to dispose of a bag. The bag turns out to contain a human head, belonging to a murdered Eastern European prostitute. The policemen try to find the man who paid Tommy to dump the bag, but the trail they end up following leads them first to Germany, then to Estonia, with each of the play's acts taking place in a different country.