Theatre review: Harvey

"There's a bit of Harvey in all of us!" says the poster tagline, which is patently untrue because not everybody eats rabbit. Mary Chase's play won the Pulitzer Prize, proving that at one time you could do so with a play that wasn't about racism in suburbia - admittedly that time was 1944, and it's hard not to go into the Theatre Royal Haymarket for Harvey with a sense of trepidation. Especially since one of the press quotes chosen to sell the show essentially says Peter McKintosh's set looks quite expensive. The play has unquestionably dated, but it's hard to entirely dislike: Veta (Maureen Lipman) is hoping to marry off her daughter Myrtle May (Ingrid Oliver,) but she's worried suitors will be put off by the family eccentric, who controls all the money: Elwood (James Dreyfus) is friendly and generous, but he's also accompanied most of the time by a pooka, a Celtic mischief spirit who takes the form of a six-foot white rabbit called Harvey, whom only Elwood can see. Veta has finally had enough of her brother's delusion, and tries to get him sectioned in Dr Chumley's (David Bamber) asylum.

Theatre review: As You Like It (Southwark Playhouse)

Southwark Playhouse's productions of Shakespeare are few and far between, but when they do tackle him - that hipster Shrew a few years back was a memorable one - they deliver.


I'm hard to please when it comes to As You Like It: As the first Shakespeare comedy I ever saw it's the one that made me fall in love with them, and I - unfairly, and involuntarily - tend to judge how well the lines are played against past favourites. But I hardly found myself doing that at all during Derek Bond's production, which has its own take on the comedy, and is hard to beat for heart and pure silly joy.