Theatre review: Bird Grove

Alexi Kaye Campbell throws a little dig at himself in Bird Grove, as a male writer telling the story of how women's voices needed to be heard, and how one woman made sure hers was one of them. She did do it under the male pseudonym of George Elliot, but in 1841 she's still Mary Ann Evans (Elizabeth Dulau,) a woman whose family is starting to worry might be getting too old to attract a husband. Her father Robert (Owen Teale) has recently retired after a lifetime of hard work which has, however, left him financially very comfortable: He's bought Bird Grove House in Coventry for him and his daughter to live in; the idea is that they'll settle into a new area as a respectable family who'll attract eligible young men to propose to Mary Ann. This isn't getting off to the best start though, as her brother Isaac (Jolyon Coy) has brought along a very bad match in Horace (Jonnie Broadbent.)

Theatre review: Cow | Deer

Katie Mitchell has been noticing that Foley art is a thing that exists, and building shows around it, on and off for years now. To be honest I probably wouldn't have booked Cow Vertical Bar Deer, which Mitchell co-creates with Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson, if it hadn't been a co-production with the National Theatre of Greece and I'd not felt like being supportive. In the end it's not quite my cup of tea but didn't feel like a waste of my time either. The show is entirely wordless, with the cast of four responding to Wilson's pre-recorded soundtrack of animal and machine noises by using Foley techniques to create the rest of the sounds heard by the titular animals: A heavily pregnant cow in a field, and in a nearby wood a deer, whose levels of fecundity the informational postcard we're given at the start doesn't disclose.

Theatre review: Life of Pi

Another show I've had rescheduled a couple of times over the last 18 months, the stage adaptation of Life of Pi that originated in Sheffield finally gets its West End opening. Yann Martel's novel was a huge bestseller twenty years ago and has already had a CGI-heavy film adaptation, and its fantastical story of animals on the high seas lends itself to stage spectacle - if they could figure out how. Lolita Chakrabarti writes the adaptation and Max Webster directs, but it's puppet designers Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell who ultimately make it possible. Piscine Patel, known as Pi (alternate Nuwan Hugh Perera) is an Indian teenager whose father (Nicholas Khan) runs a zoo. When 1970s politics turns violent and the family get stuck in the middle, they accept an offer from a Canadian zoo to relocate there along with all their animals. But along the way the cargo ship they're on sinks, and Pi is the only survivor.

Theatre review: Going Dark

Sound&Fury were behind Kursk, one of my favourite shows of 2010, so I was excited about the company's return to the Young Vic. Going Dark is another immersive show but there the similarities end as it's a much more thoughtful, small-scale affair. The audience has to go out the front of the building and round the block to the back entrance of The Clare (so don't arrive at the last minute!) where coats and bags are collected before entering the auditorium.

There's nothing metaphorical about the title Going Dark. There's little light to find your seat by and during the show there's often periods of complete darkness. The show sees Sound&Fury both expand their scope to encompass the whole Universe, and at the same time shrink their focus to inside one man's head. Max (John Mackay, formerly of the RSC's Ensemble^TM) is an astronomer whose job at a planetarium sees him describing the infinite on a daily basis. He's also the single father of six-year-old Leo. And he's rapidly going blind.