Theatre review: The Here and This and Now

Paired up with The War Has Not Yet Started in Theatre Royal Plymouth's rep season at Southwark Playhouse, Glenn Waldron's The Here and This and Now takes a look at pharmaceutical companies on an intimate scale and, eventually, a global one. Niall (Simon Darwen) leads a team of pharmaceutical reps on a team-building away-day. Alongside games where they recite their sales mantra of "Captivate! Associate! Detonate! Kill!" the central point is for them all to rehearse Niall's trademark pitch to receptionists, a cheesy story about his sick son designed to create empathy and get them five minutes with a senior consultant to sell discount liver-spot cream. Gemma (Tala Gouveia) is new to the team and enthusiastically delivers her own version of the pitch, but the other two members have been working for the company much longer and have a much more cynical outlook on what they're doing.

Non-review: The Fifth Column

Ernest Hemingway wasn't really known as a playwright; for much the same reason, it turns out, as Eric Pickles isn't really known as a rhythmic gymnast. His only play, The Fifth Column, takes place where it was written, in the only two rooms of the Hotel Florida to be sheltered from bombing, in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Preston (Michael Shelford) and Dorothy (Alix Dunmore) are American war reporters but Rawlings (Simon Darwen) is only posing as one - he's actually a spy working for the International Brigades, and has dangerous suspects locked away in various other rooms of the hotel, although a sleepy soldier (James El-Sharawy) keeps letting them escape, at which point they invariably try to kill Rawlings. Despite this the play very quickly lost my interest; I can't call this a review as I only saw the first act.

Theatre review: The Armour

Last year a trio of Tennessee Williams Hotel Plays was staged at the Langham, a luxury hotel just off Oxford Circus. 2015 is the hotel's 150-year anniversary, and after the success of last year's show, they commissioned the theatre company Defibrillator to return and commemorate it, but this time with a piece written specifically for this space. After running a competition to find a suitable play, the company settled on a pitch by Australian playwright Ben Ellis, which would look back at certain events that are unique to the Langham's history. The result is The Armour, a three-act-play which like the Williams shorts takes audiences around the building at half-hour intervals, moving upwards through the hotel's floors, while moving backwards through its history. So we begin in the present day, in one of the private basement bars where pop star Jade (Hannah Spearmint From Off Of S Club) has locked herself away when she's meant to be performing an arena gig.

Theatre review: What the Women Did

Southwark Playhouse is the latest venue to commemorate the First World War's centenary, and does so with a trio of plays by different writers that all look at some aspect of women's experience of the Great War. Although it's perhaps a bit unfortunate that each play in What the Women Did deals with women in terms of their relationship to men - first as wives, then as single women who've found the pool of available men suddenly diminished, and finally as mothers. And it's an odd little triple bill, in which the final segment is so superior to the other two it seriously overbalances the evening. But first up we've got Gwen John's Luck of War, which takes place in T'North, where Ann's (Victoria Gee) husband has been missing in action long enough to be declared legally dead, and for Ann to remarry.

Theatre review: Lizzie Siddal

The Pre-Raphaelite equivalent of a supermodel, Elizabeth Siddal modeled for John Everett Millais' Ophelia, still the most popular painting at Tate Britain, and became muse to many artists of the Victorian movement. Jeremy Green's Lizzie Siddal looks at the life beyond the image, when Lizzie moved behind the canvas and attempted to become an artist in her own right. We first meet Lizzie (Emma West) posing for William Holman Hunt (a shamelessly scene-stealing Simon Darwen) and she later gets poached by Millais (James Northcote) for her most famous role, which almost proves fatal when the water goes cold and she contracts pneumonia. But her most enduring relationship, and one that could prove more destructive than any number of cold baths, will be with the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Theatre review: Mad About the Boy

Gbolahan Obisesan's playlet Mad About the Boy offers a short, sharp look at the current generation of teenagers and centres on the idea of respect: Dad (Jason Barnett) belongs to a generation who believed you should give respect; his Boy (Bayo Gbadamosi) belongs to one that demands it categorically. Somewhere between them is Man (Simon Darwen,) who says his generation earned their respect. Man is the school counselor, earnestly trying to help the Boy whose behaviour is getting increasingly out of control; his single father seems to be just as much in need of help to figure out what the hell to do with his son. Obisesan gives us a series of scenes between two or all three of the men, employing a risky form of dramatic poetry that sees the cast speedily alternating short lines, a technique with the potential to go horribly wrong.