Theatre review: An Ideal Husband

The National Theatre's recent Importance of Being Earnest found a new angle by introducing a formidable Caribbean take on Lady Bracknell, and now Nicholai La Barrie extends that idea by giving us another Oscar Wilde play where the entire cast of characters has been reimagined as first or second generation Caribbean British. In An Ideal Husband class, power and money are constantly intertwined in a relationship that proves precarious as Lord Chiltern (Chiké Okonkwo,) a politician whose career benefited from his personal wealth, gets blackmailed about the source of that wealth: The unscrupulous Mrs Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau) has obtained a letter proving that, at the start of his career, he benefited from his parliamentary knowledge to do a bit of insider trading. She has an investment project of her own on the go, and if Chiltern publicly endorses what is very obviously a scam, she'll keep his secret.

Theatre review: The Ballad of Hattie and James

Leaving aside the fact that I've been unable to think of this as anything other than The Ballad of Hattie Jacques (and pretty much the first thing Jan said when he arrived at the theatre was that he's been exactly the same,) Samuel Adamson's The Ballad of Hattie and James comes with a good pedigree: The author returns to the Kiln having previously provided the venue with a mixed success in Wife, and the titular characters are played by Sophie Thompson and Charles Edwards. It's a moody, occasionally funny story of a friendship that goes very wrong but remains incredibly important throughout two people's lives, with all the makings of a really moving 90-minute play. The fact that it runs at an hour longer than that explains much about why the evening falls short of its potential.

Theatre review: The Fellowship

Roy Williams, whose Death of England trilogy inadvertently ended up bookending the Covid lockdowns, now turns his hand to a traditional intergenerational family drama at he continues to explore the tensions and contradictions of the children of the Windrush generation. The Fellowship, set in 2019, makes explicit reference to that generation, in the unseen 91-year-old mother of Dawn (Cherrelle Skeete.) She moved into her younger daughter's house when her health started to fail terminally - it's implied if never explicitly stated that her deterioration really began with the Home Office scandal that she got caught up in. Dawn's feelings about a mother who was physically and emotionally abusive are complicated at best, but she's still taken on most of her care compared to older sister Marcia (Suzette Llewellyn,) a barrister and one of a tiny minority of black QCs, whose career has always taken precedence.