Theatre review: The Art of Illusion

After a couple of homegrown successes, Hampstead Downstairs premieres a play that's already been a hit in France for Alexis Michalik (whose plays have all had long runs there, as the playwright himself informs us in the programme. Multiple times.) The Art of Illusion gets its UK premiere in a version by Waleed Akhtar and a production by Tom Jackson Greaves, but while its premise playfully tunes into an appealing sense of wonder, it soon comes a cropper when trying to make a story out of it. In fact the play follows three Parisian stories, two real, one fictional: In the first half of the 19th century, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (Kwaku Mills) is a magician and automaton-designer who becomes the father of modern magic, taking the tricks from carnival sideshows to theatres and royal courts. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Georges Méliès (Norah Lopez Holden) is a big fan of Robert-Houdin's, who uses this sense of magic and spectacle when he becomes a filmmaker and pioneer of visual effects.

Theatre review: The Gift

Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park is about to get a London revival but before then the Theatre Royal Stratford East jumps in with a new play that feels very much like a British response to that play: Both deal with racism in their respective countries by contrasting a story from the past with one in the present, and tackle a very real and serious matter through the surprisingly successful medium of a sharp comedy of embarrassment. And if there were any doubt that Janice Okoh's The Gift was a British play, the action centres on three excruciating tea parties. In the first two acts two black British women, both called Sarah, living over a century apart, are preparing for trips to Nigeria they don't really want to go on: Based on a real historical figure, Sarah Bonetta Davies (Shannon Hayes) was a Yoruba princess captured by enemies as a child, only to be rescued and given as a gift to Queen Victoria, who considered herself her adopted mother (although she largely packed her off to be raised by someone else.)

Theatre review: Ghost Quartet

Hot on the heels of Preludes another Dave Malloy musical makes its London debut, as does the venue where it plays: The Boulevard Theatre is built on the site of a long-lost theatre of the same name in central London; the website says the Boulevard “sits in the centre of Soho’s infamous streets and alleyways,” and I don’t know that I would have personally led with a reminder of the chances of getting mugged but hey, you do you. The building was formerly the Raymond Revue Bar and still has a massive sign for it on the wall, but once you run the gauntlet of shops selling poppers and Viagra the inside is less tits’n’minge, more the looking-like-a-mid-range-hotel feel that the front of house areas of new-build theatres always go for these days. The auditorium itself is promising though – the seats are comfortable with actual leg room, and the venue looks well-equipped and flexible: Simon Kenny’s design puts us in the round but it looks like various other layouts would be possible without losing the good sightlines.

Theatre review: Platinum

Martha (Siân Thomas) was a legendary protest singer in the 1970s, but she retired both from music and from public view. Simon (George Blagden) is a music academic doing his PhD on protest music and Martha in particular, but he's hit a brick wall and only speaking to the elusive singer herself will give him the details he needs. In a last-ditch attempt, he contacts her estranged daughter Anna (Laura Pitt-Pulford,) a commercial pop singer who's had some success with her first album, and is now struggling to put together a follow-up. Confronted with Simon's questions about her mother at a time when she's feeling vulnerable about her own work, Anna lets slip Martha's big secret: Her biggest, most influential hit was so different from her other songs because she didn't actually write it. She now lets Simon know where he can find her mother so she can give her side of the story, as writer Hannah Patterson returns to Hampstead Downstairs with her short play Platinum.