Theatre review: Farm Hall

When looking at the ethics of science, there's no more fertile ground for writers to explore than the atomic bomb. In her impressive playwrighting debut, Katherine Moar explores the issue through six scientists who've already lost the nuclear arms race - they just don't know it yet. Based on a real event and secretly recorded conversations, Farm Hall takes place during the last days of the Second World War, after Hitler's fall and the revelation of the true horrors Germany had perpetrated. The six German men are under house arrest in an English country pile, filling their time playing chess, mending a broken piano, and staging a reading of Blithe Spirit, whose recent success in the middle of the Blitz baffles them. They are Hitler's surviving nuclear physicists who hadn't already defected by VE Day, and nobody seems sure what to do with them, or even if they'll be allowed to survive their comfortable prison.

Theatre review: The Kitchen Sink

Drama school showcases technically fall under the category of amateur performances, which isn't something I like to review. But given these are people who hope to be acting professionally after graduating, I'm going to take the view that they'd want to know how their efforts come across to the public.

So Tom Wells' ubiquity in 2014 continues, and even the drama schools are including him on the curriculum as LAMDA presents his 2011 play The Kitchen Sink as one of their public shows this year. The title is a statement of intent as Wells takes the bleak kitchen sink genre of people's fruitless struggles to hold on to work and find a path in life, and turns it into something distinctly his. The family living in Withernsea, a Yorkshire town slowly falling into the sea, is crumbling just as steadily but the impression given by the play is far from grim-up-North: The overriding impression is that there's always hope, in a typically funny collection of characters. The heart of the play is school dinnerlady Kath (Clio Davies,) sick of cooking chips at work every day so trying to inject a bit of variety into her meals at home (although I'm firmly on Martin's side where couscous is concerned.)

Theatre review: The Conquest of the South Pole

Going to the theatre is a hobby I enjoy, as is blogging about it afterwards. But sometimes it can be a chore when you feel like you're run out of ways to say the same thing. Take this past month, for instance: A certain brand of late 20th Century, expressionistic European drama always goes down like a cup of cold sick in this country but in recent weeks producers seem determined that we're going to learn to like it, dammit! Stephen Unwin, who directed the original production, revives Manfred Karge's story of disaffected, unemployed youth The Conquest of the South Pole at the Arcola. All the pre-publicity has focused on the fact that the 1988 production had Alan Cumming in it (and Ewen Bremner, but with the best will in the world they're stretching there as far as name-dropping goes) and he ended up becoming famous so... come and see it this time because maybe one of this lot will become famous. Er, yay?