Theatre review: Firebird

After a couple of years away from the venue I return to the original pub theatre for the first time since it moved out of the actual pub: The King's Head is now located in a larger purpose-built theatre a few feet away from its old home - horizontally at least, vertically the new sub-sub-sub basement is a bit more of a trek. The show bringing me back is Firebird, the queer love story of Cold War Russia from Sergey Fetisov's memoir, probably best known here for the recent film version. In fact Richard Hough's stage adaptation is credited as being based as much on Peeter Rebane & Tom Prior's screenplay as it is the book: I've not read the book or seen the film yet, so approached the story of a lieutenant in trouble for touching his privates fresh; but soon got the feeling that Hough is relying on a certain amount of preexisting familiarity with the characters.

Theatre review: Tory Boyz

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The NYT are inviting the London critics in tomorrow.

A politically-themed week for me, with two Brecht plays bookmarking two plays about former Conservative Prime Ministers. The first of the latter sees the National Youth Theatre revisit a show they commissioned five years ago, James Graham's Tory Boyz. I suspect my readership won't need any hints about what the spelling of "boys" with a z signifies, but if you're a newcomer¹ you might not have inferred it was about gay Conservatives. It's an enduring contradiction in British politics that a party with a poor track record on gay rights to say the least, has always had such a high gay membership. Closeted Tory MPs getting outed certainly felt like it used to be a weekly occurrence in the 1980s, and it's always been rumoured that the party also gave the UK a closeted gay Prime Minister, in the confirmed bachelor Ted Heath.