Theatre review: Jews. In Their Own Words.

When the Royal Court announced Jonathan Freedland's Jews. In Their Own Words. as the opener for its autumn season, my brain autocorrected the title to Jews. Please Don't Boycott Us. After last year's antisemitism fiasco it was pretty obvious that this was an attempt at a mea culpa from the venue, and while there's definitely something to be said for not dragging their feet about addressing the issue, ten months since that happened seems a very quick turnaround for a theatre where scripts can percolate for years. (For anyone not up to speed: Rare Earth Mettle was meant to feature a shifty billionaire called Hershel Fink. Having seen the play, I'd say playwright Al Smith was probably going for something with the vague cadences of "Elon Musk," but he actually landed on a hugely stereotypical Jewish name, paired with an equally stereotypical moneybags character. When the play opened in previews and caused offence, the name was changed, but further controversy came with reports that some people had highlighted the connotations and been ignored.)

Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise - Wound / Telescope / River / Eclipse / Performance

Back to Coronavirus, lockdown and isolation as seen through the uniquely, romantically twisted viewpoint of Philip Ridley, as I go back for a second selection of online premiere monologues in his The Beast Will Rise series (my review of the first four is here.) The next five feature both the longest and the shortest so far, and while most of them can be seen as having a specific significance to the circumstances under which they've debuted, they all could easily remain interesting taken out of context. Probably the least obviously tied to the theme of lockdown is Wound, in which Mirren Mack gives us a journey into a troubled mind in pain, escape into both self-harm and fantasy worlds, but also a resilience that keeps her coming back to reality. A few months into lockdown and everything being done on Zoom has become visually boring, but director Wiebke Green gives Wound  its own identity with a stark clinical whiteness and maintaining an extreme close-up on Mack's face that heightens the sense of anxiety.

Theatre review: Made in Dagenham

The film-to-musical adaptation has well and truly become a West End fixture, but when the end result is as fresh and downright eccentric as Made in Dagenham, it's clear there's a labour of love involved, not just a cynical recycling of a familiar property. The story of the 1968 strike by female workers at the Ford plant in Dagenham now has a book by Richard Bean, music by David Arnold and lyrics by Richard Thomas, and gets a typically inventive debut production from Rupert Goold. Gemma Arterton plays Rita, who works as a machinist sewing chair covers for Cortinas. As part of a larger deal with management, the workers' union has agreed that this job can be downgraded to "unskilled" and, reluctantly at first, Rita joins in the talks to get their pay grade back. But even if the women's skill is recognised, they will still earn significantly less than men on the same grade, so she aims higher: The women's demands have now changed to equal pay with the men.