Theatre review: Diminished

In one of the better Hampstead Downstairs shows in a while, actor and filmmaker Sam Hoare makes a strong playwrighting debut with Diminished, which director Tom Attenborough sets in a clinical in-the-round space provided by the space's regular designer Polly Sullivan. It's a blank canvas that evokes a mental facility where Mary (Lyndsey Marshall) is being held. Although it takes a while for it to be said out loud it's clear she's there because she killed her severely disabled baby daughter. She'll be pleading diminished responsibility on the basis that depression and exhaustion caused temporary insanity, but with only a couple of days left until her trial she's decided that's not what she wants. She says she knew exactly what she was doing and deserves to serve a full prison sentence, and tries to convince Dr Parker (Rufus Wright) that his initial diagnosis was wrong.

Theatre review: Speech & Debate

An off-Broadway hit that's about to get a film adaptation, Stephen Karam's Speech & Debate is a gentle high school comedy, and a pleasingly mainstream look at LGBT teenagers' issues. Solomon (Tony Revolori) is an aspiring journalist whose ambition to get noticed means he always writes about subjects too controversial for the school paper to print. When the town is rocked by the scandal of the mayor having sex with much younger men, he decides to follow up on a rumour of one of his teachers doing the same thing. Howie (Douglas Booth) is an openly gay student who's only just transferred to the school, and been propositioned on Grindr by the drama teacher. He and Solomon find each other in the comments section of a podcast by Diwata (Patsy Ferran,) who's got a vendetta against the teacher for never casting her in school plays.

Theatre review: Experience

Dave Florez' short play Experience is about a subject I may or may not have heard of before - at one point in the play a Daily Mail story objects to it and the headline sounds familiar, but then the Daily Mail objects to pretty much everything except fascism so I could just be confusing it with something else. Sexual Surrogacy is a therapy technique originally designed to help individuals and couples with sexual problems, but it's been suggested as a way of helping rehabilitate criminals as well. Helen (Kirsty Besterman) is a therapist trying to get Dan (Christian Cooke,) who's been in a criminal psychiatric facility since he was 16, to talk to her, but he's institutionalised and unable to deal with other humans. She enlists her top sexual surrogate Amy (Charlotte Lucas) to start with something as basic as a handshake and move on to sex until he's ready to face the outside world.

Theatre review: Dinner With Friends

Like many of the Pulitzer winners I've seen before, Dinner With Friends - Donald Margulies' play won the literary prize in 2000 - concerns itself with middle class American couples spending time in each others' homes. Unlike the others, it isn't actually about racism, or indeed any subject larger than the relationships we see on stage. Food writer Gabe (Shaun Dooley) and his wife Karen (Sara Stewart) are having a friend and her children round for dinner, giving her a blow-by-blow account of their recent holiday in Italy. It's not the relentlessness of their narrative that makes Beth (Finty Williams) suddenly burst into tears though: She said the reason her husband didn't join them at the dinner party was that he was away on business, but in fact he's left her for another woman, and they're now planning to get a divorce.

Theatre review: The Wasp

Although they came from very different backgrounds, Carla and Heather were good friends at primary school. But as they got into their teens, Carla started to resent her friend's much more privileged home life. Joining up with a new group of girls, they made Heather the most frequent target of their bullying, which ended up taking a particularly vicious turn. A couple of decades on, their statuses in life aren't too different to how they were as children: Heather (Sinéad Matthews) is well-off, married but childless. After years without any contact she's found her old friend/enemy on Facebook. She invites Carla (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) for coffee, to make her a proposition. Poor, frustrated and pregnant with her fifth child, Carla assumes Heather wants to hire her as a surrogate.

Theatre review: Step 9 (of 12)

Director Tom Attenborough seems to be cornering the market in working with actors best-known for comedy, who want a chance to display a more dramatic side. After Ardal O'Hanlon in Port Authority, it's now The Inbetweeners' Blake Harrison who tackles a violent recovering alcoholic in Rob Hayes' Step 9 (of 12). Keith (Harrison) is on Alcoholics Anonymous' 12-step programme as part of his probation. Step 9 involves seeking forgiveness to those he's hurt in the past, although Keith's method of doing so seems to largely miss the point: Naming a past offense and then demanding that he be forgiven because "it's part of his recovery." He invites foster parents Alan and Judith (Barry McCarthy and Wendy Nottingham) to his crumbling flat to relive various events, from a knife attack that proved the last straw, backwards to try and find the origins of his problems.

Theatre review: Port Authority

Conor McPherson's Port Authority shares a format with another Irish play I saw last year, Terminus: That of three monologues delivered in alternating sections. This time all three of the performers are men, of different ages. Kevin, (Andrew Nolan,) in his late teens or early twenties, has only just moved out of his parents' home, into a shared house whose other residents include the girl he's in love with. They're both seeing other people, and though at times there seems to be a spark between them, it looks unlikely they'll ever do anything about it. Dermot (Ardal O'Hanlon) is middle-aged, prone to drinking too much and rather contemptuous of his wife and all the weight she's put on. For reasons that elude him, he's been handed a huge promotion he's not qualified for. Sitting between the two in his motorised wheelchair is Joe (John Rogan.) He receives an unexpected package at his old people's home, which leads to reminiscences about a neighbour he once believed himself in love with, despite hardly knowing her.

McPherson's three stories are only very tenuously connected, though you can see the thematic similarities - there's a lot of regret here, often centred on the women they do end up with just as much as the ones that got away. While still the liveliest and cheeriest of them, Nolan's character may in some ways be the most tragic - though still at the start of his life, he's already making decisions that he knows he'll come to regret. As Kevin would put it, these three men share the same soul, and it's not a fighter's.

With plays structured in multiple storylines you're always looking for them to come together in some significant way. Port Authority's connections remain a bit vaguer than that (and the title's meaning eludes me) but this doesn't make for a disappointing end result. The individual stories are interesting enough, and the performers intense enough, that there's plenty to take from the evening. Director Tom Attenborough has kept all three actors sitting still for the whole thing, on Francesca Reidy's simple set of wooden palettes, but I didn't find it visually boring. Perhaps the amount of gesticulating, which I guess is indeed quite an Irish trait, helped with that. (Or maybe I just didn't mind looking at Nolan, who is a bit lovely.) Ian said he'd been trying to figure out why, despite being interested in all three narratives, he felt most invested in Dermot's, and that he realised it was because O'Hanlon was making a huge amount of eye contact. This is certainly very effective, although I will say we were in the front row, and he seemed to be looking at the front few rows almost constantly, so it may well be that people sitting further back didn't feel the same connection. Still, three excellent performances in a lyrical play that invites a certain amount of personal interpretation.

Port Authority by Conor McPherson is booking until the 18th of February at Southwark Playhouse's Vault.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.