Theatre review: Till The Stars Come Down

Beth Steel's Till The Stars Come Down has been compared to Chekhov, and though it owes as much to Coronation Street it does centre on three sisters: In a Northern former coalmining town Hazel (Lucy Black) and Maggie (Aisling Loftus) are helping youngest sister Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) get ready for her wedding. While Hazel lives down the road with her husband John (Adrian Bower) and teenage daughters Leanne (Ruby Thompson) and Sarah (Cadence Williams, alternating with Lillie Babb and Elodie Blomfield,) and Maggie rather abruptly moved away for work some months earlier, Sylvia has stayed at home ever since their mother's death, keeping their father Tony (Alan Williams) company. So her wedding represents both moving on from the past, and a day where she can be the focus of attention rather than the supportive one, but she's got a bad feeling something's going to go wrong.

Theatre review: The Cord

Writer-director Bijan Sheibani has worked with Irfan Shamji multiple times before, so you can see why he'd take advantage of that working relationship to cast the extraordinary actor in his latest play as well, putting him at the centre of an intense mental breakdown in The Cord. It's an evening that put me in mind of The Father, in the sense that it's a brilliant evening of theatre I'm glad I caught, but not necessarily one I'd want to put myself through again. Ash (Shamji) is a new father, whose wife Anya (Eileen O'Higgins) is still recovering from a birth with some complications, but apart from the inevitable lack of sleep is largely settling into her new life, and bonding with the baby. Ash seems to feel slightly excluded from their new group, but it's only after his mother Jane (Lucy Black) visits that this seems to tip over into a more serious mental condition.

Theatre review: Sons of the Prophet

I had mixed feelings about booking for Sons of the Prophet: Stephen Karam's last play at Hampstead Theatre was That American Play Where An Extended Family Gets Together After A Long Time, Preferably At Thanksgiving But That’s Optional, but surely even the most determined American playwrights can't write that one too many times, and the premise and cast were appealing. And the play, which takes its title from the central family's distant and regularly overplayed relation to Kahlil Gibran, is certainly not clichéd in its premise: It centres on two gay brothers from a Lebanese-American Maronite Christian family, from a part of Pennsylvania where all the towns seem to be named after places in the Middle East. A few years after their mother's death, their father also dies in a car crash after a student prank goes wrong.

Theatre review: The Arrival

In a year when many theatre professionals have been branching out into new fields, prolific director Bijan Sheibani presents his first show as playwright at the Bush. Taking particular inspiration from his productions of The Brothers Size and Barber Shop Chronicles, The Arrival looks at the relationship between two men who only find out in their late twenties that they’re brothers. Tom’s (Scott Karim) biological father had Middle Eastern heritage, so he always knew his white parents had adopted him; what was a surprise, when he eventually sought out his birth parents, was that they were still married, and had had two more children, who they kept. His sister now lives in Germany but his brother Samad (Irfan Shamji) has, by coincidence, moved to the same part of London as him, and when the two meet up they instantly get on. The play opens as they start to spend time together and get to know each other.

Theatre review: Dance Nation

Concluding a season of work by female playwrights at the Almeida is Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, a funny, touching and sometimes devastating look at what it’s like to be a pre-teen girl, all framed within a national dance competition. The bullying Dance Teacher Pat (Brendan Cowell) rules the roost over a class of girls no older than 13 (all played by actors from their twenties to their fifties,) and as the trophies surrounding Samal Blak’s set can attest, has masterminded wins in dance competitions across America. Right from the start, when one girl is injured and never seen or heard of again, it’s obvious that failure is not an option, and this year’s crop of girls can either join the hall of fame – perhaps even becoming a legend like the one alumna who got into the chorus of a Broadway show – or be forgotten.