Theatre review: Prince of Denmark

The final NYT show playing in repertory at the Ambassadors, as well as in a double bill with Romeo and Juliet at selected performances, is Michael Lesslie's Hamlet prequel, Prince of Denmark. Echoing a number of elements of Shakespeare's original, the play takes particular inspiration from the moment where Laertes returns to Denmark to avenge his father's death, threatening a coup and apparently having the popular support to make it a real possibility. Taking place a year or two before the events of Hamlet, we're at the point where the Prince's love letters to Ophelia are starting to look serious. Angered by the suspicion that Hamlet is just trying to get Ophelia into bed before ditching her, Laertes' thoughts start to turn against the Danish monarchy in general. But his proto-socialist pronouncements are marred by the obvious fact that it's himself he sees replacing them in power.

Theatre review: Romeo and Juliet (NYT / Ambassadors)

Alongside the Tory Boyz revival, the National Youth Theatre's West End rep season also features two adaptations of Shakespeare tragedies. First up Romeo and Juliet, for which director Paul Roseby uses the abbreviated version Lolita Chakrabarti created for the TV show When Romeo Met Juliet a few years ago. This resets the action from Verona to 1980s Camden Town, and specifically to a market, where the warring families become rival clothes stall holders. To a background of '80s hits performed by the cast, Romeo's (Niall McNamee) professed love for Rosaline goes out of the window when he spots Juliet (Aruhan Galieva.) But he's a Montague, she's a Capulet, and ancient grudge means the match will never be allowed. Being teenagers, elopement followed by double suicide seems to them a perfectly reasonable way out of this predicament.

Theatre review: Tory Boyz

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The NYT are inviting the London critics in tomorrow.

A politically-themed week for me, with two Brecht plays bookmarking two plays about former Conservative Prime Ministers. The first of the latter sees the National Youth Theatre revisit a show they commissioned five years ago, James Graham's Tory Boyz. I suspect my readership won't need any hints about what the spelling of "boys" with a z signifies, but if you're a newcomer¹ you might not have inferred it was about gay Conservatives. It's an enduring contradiction in British politics that a party with a poor track record on gay rights to say the least, has always had such a high gay membership. Closeted Tory MPs getting outed certainly felt like it used to be a weekly occurrence in the 1980s, and it's always been rumoured that the party also gave the UK a closeted gay Prime Minister, in the confirmed bachelor Ted Heath.