Theatre review: Marie Curie

The latest in the West End's influx of East Asian theatre is a South Korean musical, although I'm not sure it heralds a K-Musical revolution to match the popularity of K-Pop or K-Drama - not until the genre develops as distinctive an identity to make it stand out. Jongyoon Choi (music) and Seeun Choun's (book & lyrics) Marie Curie, in an English version by Tom Ramsey (book) and Emma Fraser (arrangements & lyrics) follows Marie Skłodowska (Ailsa Davidson) as she travels from her native Poland to France, where she'll be the only female student of science at the Sorbonne. On the train journey she meets Anne Kowalska (Chrissie Bhima,) who's planning to get factory work, and will become a lifelong friend and link back to her beloved homeland.

Theatre review: Scandaltown

All of a sudden we're getting to see everything Mike Bartlett kept himself busy with during lockdown, with his second premiere in the space of a week. I hadn't quite registered that I'd booked them two days apart from each other, but they do show a contrast in a playwright who likes to experiment with style, and has grown fond in recent years of using familiar classic theatrical genres to reflect on the present day. So if The 47th was a tragicomedy so dark it bordered on the apocalyptic, Scandaltown, opening at the Lyric Hammersmith in a production by Rachel O'Riordan, goes for much less ambiguous laughs, applying the convoluted plots and stock characters of Restoration comedy to 21st century concerns. Phoebe Virtue (Cecilia Appiah) and her twin brother were raised in the country, and are considerate, environmentally conscious and unselfish.

Theatre review: Habeas Corpus

The Menier Chocolate Factory tends to feel like London's most conservative, if not most Conservative theatre, and as such some of its safe programming choices for a coffin-adjacent audience base can translate to disinterring creaky old farces that should have stayed buried in the 20th century. But if the farce in question is an early Alan Bennett play (early, I mean he was forty but these things are relative,) and it's directed by the prolific but usually reliable Patrick Marber, I'm prone to think it might be worth checking out anyway. Unfortunately both writer and director seem to have made a colossal error of judgement where Habeas Corpus is concerned: With a plot set in a doctor's surgery and an approach that tries to dig up the darker side of farce's obsession with sex, the play feels like it could be paying homage to Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw*. Except that play's genuinely sexy, shocking and funny.