Theatre review: The Go-Between

"How long is the show?" I heard another audience member ask an usher. "It ends at ten past ten." "But that's FOREVER!" How prescient an appraisal that turned out to be of The Go-Between, David Wood (book and lyrics) and Richard Taylor's (music) chamber musical that would probably have been dull enough in an actual chamber, but dies a slow, agonising death on a West End stage. Based on the L.P. Hartley novel famous for the line "The past is a foreign country - everyone in it's dead now and you'll wish you were too if you're watching this" (I may be paraphrasing slightly,) Michael Crawford returns to the stage to play Leo Colston, who looks back through his diaries from the summer he turned 13, and spent three weeks of his holidays at the house of school friend Marcus (Samuel Menhinick, alternating with Archie Stevens and Matty Norgren.)

Theatre review: Medea (Gate Theatre)

This is certainly the year not just for Greek Tragedy, but for plays that take some of the mythology's most famous stories and rewrite them in a new way. The Gate's Medea opens just as the Almeida's nears the end of its run, and while that interpretation - one I liked less the more I thought about it - sidelined the story's most notorious victims, to the point of not caring whether they were actually dead or not by the end, this one puts them centre stage. Writer Kate Mulvany and writer-director Anne-Louise Sarks tell the story from the bedroom shared by serious pre-teen Leon (Bili Keogh, alternating with Keir Edkins-O'Brien) and his hyper little brother Jasper (Samuel Menhinick, alternating with Bobby Smallridge.) They play, argue and discuss - tentatively - the conversation going on downstairs between their parents, which they are vaguely aware is about the future of their marriage. They're to stay in their room while their parents talk; the ominous first sound we hear is them being locked in by their mother.