Theatre review: "Art"

Florian Zeller is the French playwright who's all the rage in London at the moment, but in the nineties that title belonged firmly to Yasmina Reza. A few of her plays got West End runs but it was "Art" that brought her to public attention and became a big hit. Matthew Warchus' production ran for eight years, its gimmick of replacing the three-strong cast every couple of months keeping it in the public eye and ticket sales going strong. With Warchus now in charge of the Old Vic he's seen an opportunity to revive the play for its 20th anniversary. In fact he may well be said to be reviving the same production - I saw that twice, with one of the early cast changes at Wyndhams* and then a few years later when it had moved to the Whitehall Theatre (before it became Trafalgar Studios.) And though it's been a while this feels familiar: The latest trio to play the 40-something men who've been friends for 15 years are Rufus Sewell, Tim Key and Paul Ritter.

Theatre review: Tree

Although I've not been following Daniel Kitson's work for as long, or seen as many of his shows as a lot of people I know, those of his eccentric monologues I've seen - most recently Analog.Ue - have made me want to catch as much as I can. His latest piece - though originally staged in Manchester a couple of years ago - is a bit of a change of style. Tree is a two-man play, in which Tim Key plays a lawyer who, having not realised the clocks have gone back, arrives at a date an hour early. He's setting up a picnic in an unlikely spot his date suggested, by a large lone tree on a residential street. What makes the location even odder is that there's a man (Kitson) sitting in the branches; he claims to have been living there for the last nine years, in an attempt to stop it joining all the other trees in the street and being chopped down.