Theatre review: James Graham's Sketching

Apparently kicked off by his feeling guilty about having three plays in West End theatres in the last year while other writers struggle to get work staged, James Graham's Sketching sees him take that high profile and use it to put a few emerging playwrights in the spotlight. His idea for doing this was an update of Charles Dickens' early hit Sketches by Boz, a collection of character pieces set around Victorian London, with the gimmick that this would be the first "crowdsourced" play, accepting submissions of short plays that would be woven into the overall story. Eight playwrights' submissions were eventually accepted, and Thomas Hescott directs Samuel James, Penny Layden, Nav Sidhu, Sean Michael Verey and Sophie Wu in around fifty roles between them. Graham himself contributes four storylines that try to link all the different threads together over the course of 24 hours.

Theatre review: The Act

Matthew Baldwin is a stalwart of the Above the Stag gay panto, usually alternating between waspish dames and kinky villains, so it's surprising how gentle his one-man show, co-created with director Thomas Hescott, is. The Act is a short trip to the 1960s, following both the Parliamentary debate that would end in the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the life of a Westminster civil servant for whom the matter is close to home. Matthews had a couple of encounters at school but since then has buried his feelings for other men, busying himself with work and friends. But with the act yet to pass, he grows bolder and starts going to an underground gay bar. Soon he's fallen for a younger man whose feelings aren't returned quite as exclusively, and he finds himself on the wrong side of the law - his job making him a juicy target to be made an example of.

Theatre review: Tory Boyz

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The NYT are inviting the London critics in tomorrow.

A politically-themed week for me, with two Brecht plays bookmarking two plays about former Conservative Prime Ministers. The first of the latter sees the National Youth Theatre revisit a show they commissioned five years ago, James Graham's Tory Boyz. I suspect my readership won't need any hints about what the spelling of "boys" with a z signifies, but if you're a newcomer¹ you might not have inferred it was about gay Conservatives. It's an enduring contradiction in British politics that a party with a poor track record on gay rights to say the least, has always had such a high gay membership. Closeted Tory MPs getting outed certainly felt like it used to be a weekly occurrence in the 1980s, and it's always been rumoured that the party also gave the UK a closeted gay Prime Minister, in the confirmed bachelor Ted Heath.