Theatre review: Roaring Trade

When Steve Thompson's Roaring Trade premiered in 2009, it was nominally set a couple of years earlier, as it lifted the lid on some of the dodgy-but-legal trading practices that had caused the banking crash. In Alan Cohen's revival at the Park, today's Evening Standard is clearly displayed at one point, because this is a play about characters, and an industry, that doesn't learn lessons (unless it's the lesson that they can keep doing what they like because they'll get bailed out if it goes wrong.) Donny (Nick Moran) is the archetypal barrow-boy trader; he and his colleague Jess (Lesley Harcourt) spend their days buying and selling stock for millions of pounds at a time; their preferred technique includes bullying and manipulating their co-workers into making mistakes that will work out to their own benefit.

Theatre review: Positive

The first generation of HIV/AIDS plays kicked off with As Is, which was seen at the Finborough in 2013 and is currently being revived at Trafalgar Studios. But we now live in a very different environment in which HIV is much more treatable, but on the downside this has led to confidence bordering on flippancy about unsafe sex, with rates of infection, especially among young gay men, on the rise again. So Shaun Kitchener's play could perhaps be part of an overdue new wave of theatre on the subject. It's one in which, as the title suggests, Positive doesn't just have to be the test result but can be the outlook too, but the fact that it's not an automatic death sentence doesn't mean everything goes smoothly either. Benji (Timothy George) was diagnosed HIV-Positive a year ago, and although he's found a supportive friend and flatmate in Nikki (Nathalie Barclay) he's rarely ventured out of his room in that time except to go to work.

Theatre review: The Woman in the Moon

The Elizabethans were big believers in Astrology, and Shakespeare often has characters stop and bemoan the influence of celestial bodies on their lives. John Lyly, thought to have been a big influence on Shakespeare, had gone one step further in The Woman in the Moon, in which they take a very hands-on interest in the plot. It's a sort of alternative creation myth, where four shepherds (Joel Davey, Rhys Bevan, James Askill and Robert Heard) have seen the sorts of things their sheep get up to and complain to Nature (Julia Sandiford) about the lack of any human females so they can join in the fun. So Nature creates the first woman, Pandora (Bella Heesom.) She may have done a bit too good a job though, as the stars and planets resent the appearance of something as luminous as themselves on Earth. They resolve to use their very different influences on her, taking turns to affect her moods until both Pandora and her various suitors have been driven to distraction.