Theatre review: Don Gil of the Green Breeches

The Arcola's main space starts the year by transferring from Bath a trio of plays performed in repertory, forming a Spanish Golden Age season. On the evidence of the first show, if this is what their Golden Age was like, I'd hate to see what happened when Spanish playwrights were having a bad hair century. Tirso de Molina's Don Gil of the Green Breeches is a comedy, it says here, of disguise and mistaken identity. Don Martin (Doug Rao) has promised marriage to Donna Juana (Hedydd Dylan) and already claimed his conjugal rights. But before he put a ring on it, his father demanded that should instead marry wealthy heiress Donna Ines (Katie Lightfoot.) Rather than not mention the existence of a girlfriend in the first place, it's decided that Martin should go to Ines in disguise and claim her hand as the fictional Don Gil, because ???

Theatre review: Damned by Despair

"Ooh, Betty, they're going to hang me in the morning!"

With Our Class, Eurydice and his take on Ghosts, Bijan Sheibani was shaping up as one of my favourite directors, with a talent for bringing out the best in what looked like unpromising subjects; but in the last year or so his name has been attached to more than its share of stinkers, especially at the National Theatre. Meanwhile Sebastian Armesto is an actor I like, but who also seems to have been plonked by the National into some of its more unremarkable, at best, stuff. So a production on the National's biggest stage, directed by Sheibani and starring Armesto would seem, to a superstitious person, to be some kind of omen of disaster. But just because mystical signs seem to be predicting a horrible doom doesn't mean you have to act accordingly, does it? So along I went to Damned by Despair, this year's final Travelex production.