Theatre review: Rhinoceros

Omar Elerian continues to be a big advocate of Eugène Ionesco's work, returning to the Almeida after The Chairs to adapt and direct Rhinoceros, a play whose wildness, chaos and horrors mirror the real-life situations it satirises. A quiet Sunday in a small village that may or may not be in France is disrupted when a rhinoceros charges through the square, later followed by a second one (or the same one doing a loop.) Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù plays Berenger, who's already got problems with alcohol before the play starts, and is unlikely to find it easier to cope once the rhinos start arriving - particularly as everyone else in town seems to view them as a minor inconvenience at most. But as the week goes on and everyone tries to get back to work, things are further disrupted as it becomes apparent this isn't an incursion of pachiderms from outside: The human residents are, one by one, turning into rhinos.

Theatre review: The Brothers Size

After twenty or so years running the Young Vic it’s understandable if David Lan wants to bring back a past hit in his final season; and unsurprising if that’s The Brothers Size, given playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s high profile following Moonlight’s win (and the headline-grabbing mix-up) at last year’s Oscars. This is the play that first made McCraney’s name in the UK and, written around the same as the unperformed play that inspired Moonlight, it’s different but recognisably covers some of the same ground. Oshoosi Size (Jonathan Ajayi) has recently been released from prison and, while on parole, is living with his older brother Ogun (Sope Dirisu,) a mechanic who’s been making a success of his own garage while Oshoosi’s been away. Oshoosi is enjoying his freedom and wants his own car so he can test its limits, but Ogun insists he get a job and stick strictly to the terms of his probation.

Theatre review: Coriolanus (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Season director Angus Jackson returns for the fourth and last of the RSC's Roman plays, and although Coriolanus is set earlier than the other three, designer Robert Innes Hopkins eschews the togas of the middle two plays, to match the modern dress of Titus Andronicus. In fact this also starts with a rioting gang in hoodies, and since it will actually play first when they all transfer to London, it annoyed me a bit that it'll look there like Blanche McIntyre copied the idea. Fortunately there was less to annoy me about the rest of the production, in which Sope Dirisu takes on the least likeable of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Caius Martius, later given the title Coriolanus after one of his many military victories, is a one-man Roman army, raised as such by his batshit bloodthirsty mother Volumnia (Haydn Gwynne.)

Theatre review: One Night in Miami...

A bit of a thought out of nowhere: Not only are Professor X and Magneto on a London stage at the moment, there's also plays set in the motel rooms of both the civil rights figures who inspired those characters. This time last week it was Martin Luther King, now One Night in Miami... is spent in Malcolm X's room - again with some surprising company. Kemp Powers' play is another fictionalised version of a night that really happened: Four famous men who were also old friends, meeting on the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali first won the heavyweight title. At the time Ali was still called Cassius Clay (Sope Dirisu,) but Malcolm X (Francois Battiste) had convinced him to join the Nation of Islam, and Clay was on the verge of going public with his support and change of name. Also there are the American football star Jim Brown (David Ajala) and singer-songwriter Sam Cooke (Arinzé Kene,) at the time best known for soppy but successful love songs.

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.