Theatre review: Cyprus Avenue

Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone is currently directing both shows at the Royal Court, and both feature people's minds being fractured by paranoia. X might take us to the future in the main house but Upstairs Cyprus Avenue is dominated by the past, and the sectarian Troubles that have defined Northern Ireland for centuries. Black comedies don't come much blacker than David Ireland's play about Eric (Stephen Rea,) an Ulster loyalist who's spent his life fighting the IRA and hating all Catholics. Now there's a peace in which neither side got everything they wanted, and he's not sure what the country's identity is or, by extension, his own. This crisis has been bubbling under the surface until he sees his newborn granddaughter and becomes convinced that she's actually Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in disguise, leading a charge to invade Protestant homes.

Theatre review: Ballyturk

Enda Walsh and his regular collaborator Cillian Murphy reunite for Ballyturk, and while this time Murphy doesn't have to carry the whole show on his own like in Misterman, he must be using as much energy as if he was on stage alone again. Walsh is frequently compared to Samuel Beckett, and while the debt he owes has always been obvious, I've always found Walsh's work easier to like, displaying as it does a much better sense of the theatrical than Beckett's, which I find better on the page than on the stage. In Ballyturk the influence is more apparent than ever: Two men who may or may not be brothers, 1 (Murphy) and 2 (Mikel Murfi) are trapped in a windowless, doorless room and have been for longer than they can remember. Their waking hours are built around routines they must follow: Most important of these is that when the cuckoo clock chimes, they must take on the persona of a resident of the fictional village of Ballyturk, and act out their daily lives.