Theatre review: James Graham's Sketching

Apparently kicked off by his feeling guilty about having three plays in West End theatres in the last year while other writers struggle to get work staged, James Graham's Sketching sees him take that high profile and use it to put a few emerging playwrights in the spotlight. His idea for doing this was an update of Charles Dickens' early hit Sketches by Boz, a collection of character pieces set around Victorian London, with the gimmick that this would be the first "crowdsourced" play, accepting submissions of short plays that would be woven into the overall story. Eight playwrights' submissions were eventually accepted, and Thomas Hescott directs Samuel James, Penny Layden, Nav Sidhu, Sean Michael Verey and Sophie Wu in around fifty roles between them. Graham himself contributes four storylines that try to link all the different threads together over the course of 24 hours.

Theatre review: Monster Raving Loony

You do tend to get a little something extra when you're in the audience for a James Graham play; The Man had its receipts, Privacy came with airline safety-style instruction cards, while his latest, Monster Raving Loony, comes with a whole goody bag on every seat, containing party hat, bingo card, raffle ticket and a gift - mine had a party blower but I spotted comedy mustaches and plastic Groucho Marx glasses elsewhere*. This being Graham, the sort of party this is is a political party, but not the kind with actual hopes of winning an election - in fact one rule of the Monster Raving Loony Party was that anyone who actually won their seat would be expelled from the party. This is the story of Screaming Lord Sutch, born in 1940 as David Sutch (Samuel James) in Harrow, North London, growing up in a cluttered house with his widowed mother while the nearby public school churned out future ministers.

Theatre review: Fault Lines

An office-based comedy can be a good vehicle for shining a light on the kinds of jobs everyone knows someone must have to do, but don't usually think too much about. When thinking of disaster relief charities, we're likely to imagine the people going to the scenes of earthquakes and tsunamis to help survivors. But someone has to make sure the money's going to the right place and keep the charity visible enough that more of it keeps coming in, and these are the people Ali Taylor puts at the centre of Fault Lines. Employing just four people plus an unpaid intern, a lesser-known disaster charity is struggling to stay afloat. An earthquake in Pakistan on Christmas Eve gives manager Pat (Nichola McAuliffe) the idea of being the first people on the scene. But the staff are hungover and bickering, and prone to making big mistakes.