Theatre review: Fun Home

The Young Vic’s programme is announced so far in advance that only now, months after Kwame Kwei-Armah took over as Artistic Director, do we get the final show programmed by his predecessor David Lan. And it’s a powerful note to end on, as he imports Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lisa Kron’s (book and lyrics) unconventional Broadway musical hit Fun Home, which adapts Alison Bechdel’s non-linear, autobiographical graphic novel for the stage. The story device sees Kaisa Hammarlund as the adult Alison try to write her book, struggling to come up with the correct caption to describe her relationship with her father Bruce (Zubin Varla,) the relationship which forms the centre of her story. It’s largely the story of her coming to terms with her sexuality and coming out, told through flashbacks to her childhood as Small Alison (Harriet Turnbull, alternating with Brooke Haynes) and her college years as Medium Alison (Eleanor Kane.)

Theatre review: The Flick

My Twitter feed's been bubbling over with excitement for months over the arrival of Annie Baker's The Flick at the National - which probably says more about how I've filled my feed with other theatre geeks than anything else, since this is far from headline-grabbing fodder, rather an incredibly slow and measured three-hander clocking in at nearly three-and-a-half hours. (At least the NT has offset the running time with an early start - almost as if they've heard of people with jobs to go to the next morning.) Sam Gold's original production crosses the Atlantic with a couple of the US cast in tow, and the Dorfman auditorium looks in on a whole other bank of empty seats as David Zinn's set is a small fleapit cinema somewhere in Massachusetts, the fourth wall where the screen would be. We're following ushers Avery (Jaygann Ayeh) and Sam (Matthew Maher,) and projectionist Rose (Louisa Krause) in the time between movie showings or after the cinema closes, as they clean up after the customers.