Theatre review: The Playboy of the Western World

"What is it she's after sayin'?"

I guess Southwark Playhouse is the sort of theatre actors can't bear to leave - the new show in The Little features Barney McElholm, who was in the cast of the previous show Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, while Ciaran O'Brien, who had a small role in Orson's Shadow in the main house, has moved straight next door to take the title role in JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. The setting is a remote part of County Mayo in the early 1900s, in the small house that serves as the only pub for miles around. It's the sort of isolated spot where the arrival of a newcomer is big news, and Christy Mahon (O'Brien) makes himself particularly popular when he arrives filthy and exhausted, announcing that he's run away from the family farm after murdering his father in the potato field.

Theatre review: I Am a Camera

Cabaret returns to London next month but first up we get the play that inspired it, John Van Druten's I Am a Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood's recollections of his time in Berlin. In the suitably dingy space of Southwark Playhouse's Vault, designer James Turner has created a room in Fraulein Schneider's boarding house on a two-sided raised thrust - it doesn't come with any mod cons, but it does come with a three-piece band playing mournfully behind the walls. It's the room that Isherwood (Harry Melling) occupies at the start of the play, but his ailing finances mean he's about to move to an even smaller and cheaper room across the hall. Replacing him in this room will be another English ex-pat, Sally Bowles (Rebecca Humphries,) an aspiring actress with a fondness for all the wrong men. Over the summer and autumn of 1932 we follow their friendship, and the way they and their bohemian circle of friends react to the rise of the Nazis.