Theatre review: From Here To Eternity

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Tim Rice says he doesn't believe in long preview periods, but his producers do so the official reviewers are being kept at bay until next week.

Although based on a novel by James (not Earl) Jones, the film of From Here To Eternity is so well-known it probably qualifies Tim Rice's new musical as the latest in the movie-to-musical trend. Rice has teamed up with composer Stuart Brayson to tell the story of US soldiers stationed in Hawaii in late 1941, knowing that they're bound to be joining World War II sooner or later but not realising the incident that draws America in will come to them directly. In the meantime they're in a limbo state with little to occupy their time. Newcomer Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Robert Lonsdale) is a boxer who no longer boxes, a bugler who no longer blows the bugle, and uninterested in casual sex, which marks him out as different to the other soldiers. He falls in love with Lorene (Siubhan Harrison,) a prostitute who's also uninterested in casual sex, which marks her out out as a woman who makes poor career choices.

Theatre review: Talk Show

After last week's all-female show, an all-male cast rounds off the Royal Court's weekly rep season, although a couple of absent women do loom large in Alistair McDowall's Talk Show, which Caroline Steinbeis directs. Three generations of unemployed men share a small house in an unnamed town that's been badly hit by the recession. Bill (Ferdy Roberts) has moved into the living room to let his ageing father Ron (Alan Williams) have his bedroom, while the basement is occupied by Bill's 26-year-old son Sam (Ryan Sampson.) With little else to do, Sam hosts a YouTube talk show every night, interviewing locals for the benefit of eight viewers (on a good night.) After one of these shows has wrapped up, a filthy, half-naked man (Jonjo O'Neill) crawls in through the basement window: It's his uncle Jonah, who's been missing for five years, and now wants Sam to hide him there for a while.

Theatre review: Pigeons

Carrie Cracknell directs the next play in the Royal Court's Weekly Rep season, Suhayla El-Bushra's disturbing, often comic Pigeons, a pretty brutal look at the fragility of relationships in a multicultural society. Played out in more or less reverse order and divided into "Shit That Went Wrong," "Shit That Went Right" and "Shit That Went Wrong (Again)" (the chapter titles spray-painted onto Chloe Lamford's now-familiar packing crate set,) it follows two teenage friends, Ashley (Ryan Sampson) and Amir (Nav Sidhu.) Ashley is the child of a pretty nasty divorce that's seen him and his sister in the custody of different parents, and his friendship with Amir, that dates back to primary school, has provided him with a second family. He often stays over, playing chess with Amir's father Hassan (Paul Bhattacharjee,) flirting with his sister Ameena (Farzana Dua Elahe) and eating his mum's samosas.

Theatre review: Floyd Collins

In 1925, after going alone into a particularly deep cave in Kentucky, gold miner Floyd Collins got trapped underground. The rescue attempt became national news, with a media circus camped outside the cave entrance. Southwark Playhouse's Vault is a large, dark, damp railway tunnel that splits into two narrower tunnels, and James Perkins' design is the first I've seen there not to cover this up and instead to utilise the depths ahead. Visually, this show is a great match to the space and offers, for free, the kind of breathtaking set the biggest-budget West End show would envy, easily conjuring up the intimidating underground spaces the story takes place in. But Floyd Collins is a musical, and here we stumble on one of the biggest problems with Derek Bond's production: Since seeing Parade here I've doubted the suitability of staging musicals in a space with such dodgy acoustics and sadly Floyd Collins only confirmed this for me.