Theatre review: Chasing Hares

The Cut is a street absolutely packed with restaurants, and on a much more comfortable summer night after a heatwave that means it's bustling when the Young Vic lets out for an interval at 8:40pm. Not just with people eating out - tonight there was a positive Tour de France of Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat delivery riders trying not to crash into each other. It's like a free bit of scene-setting atmosphere for Sonali Bhattacharyya's Chasing Hares, whose framing device sees present-day London food delivery rider Amba (Saroja-Lily Ratnavel) frustrated by the app she works for, which requires her to stay on standby, unpaid, in the hope that an order will come in; as well as needing the money herself, she wants to chip in to help a colleague who's had his bike stolen. This sense of community among riders who in theory should be competing for orders is one her father would like to see harnessed to get them better pay and conditions.

Stage-to-screen review: OUTSIDE

Well, we can add another authentic theatre experience to the streaming equivalent: Those times a show has to be interrupted due to a technical hitch (and you're not sure how long it'll take to fix, should you go to the loo in case the show overruns a lot, or will you be out of your seat when it starts again?) Following last month's INSIDE, the Orange Tree live stream returns with a second trio of new short plays - this time all written by people who've worked at the venue before, if not necessarily as a writer. Unsurprisingly the theme this time is OUTSIDE, and Sonali Bhattacharyya's Two Billion Beats interprets this as a school playground, where star pupil Asha (Zainab Hasan) is uncharacteristically having to clean up graffiti as detention, while her little sister Bettina (Ashna Rabheru) loiters, not wanting to get on the bus alone and get bullied. Unfortunately I can't critique Two Billion Beats as Hasan's microphone failed just as we were getting to the crux of the play, so I didn't hear most of her dialogue from that point on; but the start did seem promising, with Asha comparing her school essay-writing technique to clickbait that gets her teacher hooked.