Theatre review: The Woods

It might be long past time to add David Mamet to the pile of theatre creatives life's honestly way too short to be doing with: The Woods may be one of those rare shows that comes in slightly under the advertised running time, but it feels about twice as long. Dating from 1977, it's one of the battle-of-the-sexes plays Mamet really should have realised aren't his forte by now, and sees young couple Nick (Sam Frenchum) and Ruth (Francesca Carpanini) take a break at the remote cabin Nick inherited from his family. City girl Ruth is charmed and endlessly fascinated by the rural setting but Nick, who spent a lot of time at the cabin as a child, seems to associate the place with bad memories and be frightened of almost everything about the surrounding woods and lakes, to the point that you have to wonder why he ever agreed to return there in the first place. What he's probably really afraid of is being with his girlfriend in a place with no distractions, and having to confront what his actual feelings are.

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya is Anya Reiss' third Chekhov adaptation with Russell Bolam at the helm, and hopefully that'll let her view it as a trilogy and return to her own original plays, which in the past have been rather good. (Although here's a fun game, see if you can spot the bit on the website where it actually says this was written by Anton Chekhov. It's there somewhere. Like Wally.) This is one of the Chekhov plays I've seen less often, and I've yet to see a production that convinced me of its greatness. Spoiler alert, but this production didn't either. John Hannah plays the titular Vanya, who's spent most of his life taking care of the farm owned by his late sister, and now passed on to her widower, the elderly academic Serebryakov (Jack Shepherd.) The latter has now retired and come back to the farm with his new young wife Yelena (Rebecca Night,) where he's not entirely welcome.

Theatre review: Ghost From a Perfect Place

Philip Ridley's fascination with all things relating to his native East End resulted in his screenplay for the 1990 film The Krays. East End gangsters and the peculiar brand of nostalgia they inspire were a theme he revisited four years later in Ghost From a Perfect Place, although this being Ridley's stage work it occupies an even stranger universe than the real one. The Perfect Place in question is the past, when Bow was terrorised by a gang led by Travis Flood. They were responsible for a number of bodies in the cement of the flyover as well as some lifelong scarring in those who crossed them and survived, and their leader in particular, known as the man with the lily in his lapel, inspired such fear that crowds would part like the Red Sea for him. And yet the locals remember these as "the heydays." As the police started to catch up with the gang he took his money and fled to America, but now Travis (Michael Feast) has returned for one last look at what used to be his turf.

Theatre review: Three Sisters (Southwark Playhouse)

Until the last couple of years there was a dearth of Chekhov productions that offered anything other than a naturalistic period setting. Yet even before directors started to get a bit more adventurous around him, there was one play I'd only ever seen in modern dress. It's rather depressing that the play people always seem to think remains most relevant is Three Sisters, a play so bleak even Chekhov didn't try to pass it off as a comedy. Anya Reiss is another writer to bring the sisters bang up to date, although she does have previous - and her Seagull was also directed by Russell Bolam, so their return to Southwark Playhouse is a bit of a dream team reunion. The names of the characters haven't been Anglicised, but in other respects Reiss has tested the story's contemporary relevance by giving it a whole new context: The story is now set among British ex-pats in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

Theatre review: In Skagway

A minor alchemical miracle at the Arcola, where they've learned the secret of turning gold into base metal. The gold is in them thar hills - it's the tail end of the American gold rush, which has reached as far as Alaska. The base metal is the leaden thunk of everything else about Karen Ardiff's breathtakingly inept first play In Skagway. Frankie (Angeline Ball) was a terrible actress who, possibly by accident, gave one good performance and traded on it the rest of her life. May (Geraldine Alexander) was her adoring flunky who tirelessly accompanied her around the United States, along with May's daughter T-belle (Kathy Rose O'Brien.) For reasons unknown to god or man, the trio wound up in Skagway, Alaska, where T-belle became a prospector and Frankie had a stroke, leaving her babbling incoherently or, to put it another way, making more sense than any of the other dialogue.

Theatre review: Somersaults

Russell Bolam directed my top show of 2012, and he kicks off 2013 with an English premiere, Iain Finlay Mcleod's Somersaults. The main show at the Finborough, it shares with the venue's current alternate show a Scottish lead character with Scots Gaelic as his first language, but is a very different, and in many ways even odder, creature. When he first reconnects with old university friend Mark (Simon Harrison) via Facebook, James (David Carlyle) seems to have it all: Thanks to a canny discovery and good investments, he's got a lot of cash and free time, which he's used to fill the Hampstead flat he and wife Alison (Emily Bowker) share with lots of desirable stuff. But his finances aren't what he thought they were, and soon an unusually posh bailiff, Barrett (Richard Teverson) turns up and his belongings and home are gone, with Alison not far behind.

Theatre review: The Seagull

Russell Bolam, who directed Shivered, returns to Southwark Playhouse's main house to tackle Chekhov, bringing with him one of that show's stars, Joseph Drake. The play is my favourite Chekhov, The Seagull, and for this modern-day version Bolam uses a first foray into adapting classic texts from rising playwright Anya Reiss. The setting is an island that may or may not be the Isle of Man, and celebrated stage actress Arkadina (Sasha Waddell) is staying for the summer with her elderly brother Sorin (Malcolm Tierney.) Arkadina's son Konstantin (Drake) feels as if his mother resents him, and tries to get out of her shadow by writing plays, the first of which will be premiered for an exclusive audience of family and friends, and star Nina (Lily James,) the neighbour he's in love with. When this performance goes awry, it provides a turning point for Konstantin's rather fragile mental state, and sets off a tragic chain of events.

Re-review: Shivered

You can read my original review of Philip Ridley's latest play Shivered here; at the end of it I said I could have gone straight back to the theatre and watched it again. That, of course, wasn't possible (apparently even actors have homes to go to) but as the end of the run neared I increasingly wanted to catch the show again before it ended, and a few days ago booked for its final performance last night.

It's no secret that as far as I'm concerned, Shivered is the show to beat this year, and a second visit did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm. The scenes are shown out of chronological order, which means on a first viewing one of the pleasures is in putting the story together in your head and realising how seemingly innocuous events seen early on have a greater significance. But even without this element of surprise, there's satisfaction to be found in the dramatic ironies that pepper early scenes (Gordy's bullshit "story of Baby G" features an event that closely mirrors how Mikey's story will end, as well as links to Alec's experiences in the Middle East.)

Theatre review: Shivered

The second in this year's Philip Ridley-fest (so far, four of his plays are in, or will be coming to, London,) and after a revival of his first play it's the premiere of his latest work, Shivered. Straying for once from the East End, Ridley takes us to an Essex new-town, built largely to accommodate a Japanese car manufacturer, who then upped sticks a couple of years later. Two families form the core of the story: Lyn (Olivia Poulet) and Mikey (Simon Lenagan) whose grown-up son Alec (Robbie Jarvis) is in the Army, and whose younger son Ryan (Joseph Drake) was born with a deformity they blame on the car plant; and morbidly obese single mother Evie (Amanda Daniels,) a phoney psychic whose son Jack (Josh Williams) is regularly, viciously beaten by a gang of local bullies. The families are linked by the friendship between the two 12-year-olds, and by Gordy (Andrew Hawley,) a charismatic fairground worker with a thing for older women.