Theatre review: La Cage aux Folles [The Play]

I've had misjudged or unlikely musical adaptations on the brain recently, and not just because of the obvious suspect - announcements in the last couple of weeks have suggested that Joe diPietro alone is going to be flinging a hell of a lot of insanity at stages both sides of the Atlantic over the next few months. But then there's the other extreme, where a musical adaptation has worked so well it's overshadowed the original: The Jerry Herman / Harvey Fierstein musical is what comes to mind when you hear La Cage aux Folles, to the extent that Park Theatre have felt it best to append [The Play] to the title, to clarify that Simon Callow's new version is based on Jean Poiret's original French farce. Any songs that show up are going to be lip-synced because the title refers to a drag club run by Georges (Michael Matus) in early 1970s St Tropez.

Theatre review: Rita, Sue and Bob Too

The Royal Court run of Rita, Sue and Bob Too has turned out to be Schrödinger’s Play – for a while it was simultaneously happening and not happening. Vicky Featherstone cancelled the London performances when the subject matter seemed a bit too close both to the revelations of sexual harassment in the theatre industry in general, and by the production’s original co-director Max Stafford-Clark in particular. She was persuaded to change her mind on the basis that the play could help illuminate the issue, as well as the irony that it was a female playwright – Andrea Dunbar wrote the play when she was 19 – who wouldn’t be heard. So Out of Joint’s touring production, now directed solely by Kate Wasserberg, gets to bring 1982 Bradford to 2018 London for three weeks and show 15-year-olds Rita (Taj Atwal) and Sue (Gemma Dobson) spend their Friday night babysitting for a local couple.

Theatre review: The Libertine

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Despite already having had a full run in Bath, this doesn't seem to have invited the newspaper critics in yet.

A comedy about the Restoration, as opposed to a Restoration Comedy, although we do see something of that genre's creation in The Libertine, a 1994 play by Stephen Jeffreys first seen at the Royal Court and now getting a West End revival from Terry Johnson. George Etherege's best-known work The Man of Mode* is reputed to have been based on the real-life 2nd Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, and it's Rochester (Dominic Cooper) that Jeffreys puts centre-stage, a favourite of Charles II (Jasper Britton) which is probably the only reason he managed to avoid execution. A regular at London's playhouses, except when he's been banished to the country for pissing off the king, at the start of the play Rochester returns from one such involuntary trip to find a new actress in town: Lizzie Barry (Ophelia Lovibond) is routinely booed off the stage for what, compared to the highly stylised acting style of the time, seem like incredibly unenthusiastic performances.

Theatre review: Race

At some point David Mamet must have decided that dealing with a single inflammatory topic in 85 minutes wasn't enough for him, hence Race which covers both rape and racial politics in a legal drama that never actually sets foot in a courtroom. Following an ongoing sexual relationship with a much younger black woman, white millionaire Charles Strickland (Charles Daish) has been accused by her of rape. Having left his original lawyer, Strickland turns up at the offices of Jack Lawson (Jasper Britton) asking him to take on his case - the fact that Lawson's business partner Henry Brown (Clarke Peters) is black will, he hopes, stand in his favour with the jury. The lawyers aren't keen to take him on but an error by Lawson's protégée Susan (Nina Toussaint-White, who regenerated into River Song on Doctor Who) sees them legally bound to represent him. The race is now on to second-guess how the case's racial makeup will affect the jury, and find the one piece of evidence so compelling it'll override it.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good toured last year, but that hasn't put original director Max Stafford-Clark off returning to it with his Out of Joint company to mark its 25th anniversary. The play has become an A'level set text, and accordingly the St James Theatre - where the new production ends a national tour - was fuller than I'm used to seeing it, largely with school parties. From the snippets of conversation I overheard, Our Country's Good inspires a lot of strong feeling in the teenagers who study it, and they seemed completely satisfied by a production that's been cast with a number of actors who aren't exactly household names, but will be familiar to theatre aficionados. Most of them have to play multiple roles in Wertenbaker's sometimes overtly Brechtian telling of the true-ish story of the early days of Australia, when some of the recently-arrived prisoners performed George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer.