Theatre review: Jonah and Otto

We first meet ageing clergyman Otto (Peter Egan, from the 1980s,) hugging a wall, but he's not the most unpredictable character in Robert Holman's Jonah and Otto. Somewhere in a seaside town, Otto is accosted by Jonah (Alex Waldmann,) a younger man pushing his six-week-old daughter in a supermarket trolley, and trying to get money by variously begging, stealing, and performing magic tricks. Despite having only just met, the two men seem to have become quickly invested in each other, and are soon questioning each other on not only their life stories, but also their deepest thoughts on life itself. Holman is a writer whose work I approach with a fair amount of trepidation - I found Making Noise Quietly oppressively boring, but there were parts of Across Oka I thought worked beautifully. On the surface Jonah and Otto is as wilfully oblique as the former play, but in Tim Stark's production at least I found it much more successful.

Theatre review: Khadija is 18

Sociology lecturer Shamser Sinha has a decade's experience working with young asylum seekers, so it's no surprise that this informs his debut full-length play, Khadija is 18. It focuses on two 17-year-old unaccompanied refugees, Khadija (Aysha Kala) from Afghanistan, whose whole family were killed; and Liza (Katherine Rose Morley) from an unnamed Eastern European country, who is pretending that her baby sister is her daughter, in an attempt to get them both asylum. We spend six months with them as they worry about the usual teenage issues like their college classes and Khadija's relationship with Ade (Victor Alli.) But their refugee status means they also have to deal with additional problems like sub-minimum wage jobs, Liza's isolation looking after the baby, and people like Ade's friend Sam (Damson Idris,) who spouts tabloid opinions about benefit-cheating "refs." And above it all loom their 18th birthdays, when Immigration will decide if they can stay in the UK.