Theatre review: Christmas Day

For the Almeida's last show of the year the audience enters the Stalls via the side door by the dressing rooms; as we don't then encounter a dead bull bleeding crude oil onto the stage, that's setting us up for disappointment right from the off. A dead fox does eventually get dumped on the dinner table of Sam Grabiner's Christmas Day though. The title describes the date when events take place but things are a bit more complex with regard to what exactly is being celebrated, as most of the characters are Jewish and have different opinions on whether or not it's OK to fill the room with the trappings of a Christian holiday. Brother and sister Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Transphobia Ltd Employee Bel Powley) live in an abandoned office building as tenant guardians, along with Noah's girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and various other young people.

Theatre review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The National usually puts a family show on one of its larger stages around Christmas but this year's offering winds up in the Dorfman; perhaps because, although it has its share of spectacle in Fly Davis and Samuel Wyer's design and Jamie Harrison's illusions, Katy Rudd's production relies heavily on old-fashioned theatricality and the work of its ensemble to bring its magic to life. Joel Horwood adapts Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, in which the favourite Gaiman trope of the witchy Maiden, Mother and Crone guard the borders between realities. Samuel Blenkin is the unnamed Boy who, in 1983, a year after losing his mother, has another encounter with death on his 12th birthday when he finds the body of his family's lodger. The man has killed himself after gambling away other people's money, and the traumatic event close to a place where the boundaries between realities are weak wakes something on the other side.