Theatre review: Jam

In Matt Parvin’s first full-length play Jam, Bella Soroush (Jasmine Hyde) is a teacher at one of the high schools in a rural part of the South West. She used to teach at the other local school until an incident with a pupil, Kane McCarthy, ten years earlier. It was an event that scarred her and nearly ended her career, but she got back on track, and is alone at her new school one night, marking papers when Kane (Harry Melling) breaks in with a baseball bat. He says he isn’t going to harm her and she lets him have his say, but she’s clearly still afraid and no wonder: A chaotic presence at 13, with ADHD, dyslexia and an obsession with elaborate pranks, he still seems volatile at 23. He says he’s returned now because he’s got a brain tumour and has been given six months to live, and wants to tie up loose ends in his life; his story is detailed but Bella isn’t quite prepared to accept it isn’t a new and particularly dark practical joke.

Theatre review: I Wish To Die Singing

Finborough boss Neil McPherson takes a break from reading new and forgotten plays to put one of his own together, a verbatim play about events in 1915 and later. I Wish To Die Singing - Voices from the Armenian Genocide mixes the history of Turkey during the First World War (the show is part of the occasional THEGREATWAR100 series) with the accounts of those who survived a massacre that inspired the very term "genocide" to be invented and officially defined. With Turkey having sided with Germany in the war and suffering a major defeat, a scapegoat was sought. The Christian Armenians, long the business leaders in the Ottoman Empire and resented for it, made for an easy and popular target, and brutal "cleansing" was ordered. The fact that this genocide was largely forgotten or denied within a couple of decades is quoted as a reason Hitler felt encouraged to follow a similar course of action with the Jews.

Theatre review: Obama-ology

You got an ology? You're a scientist!

I don't know if it's very good or very bad timing that Aurin Squire's play Obama-ology makes its UK debut just as Obama's presidency looks likely to end on a whimper; probably the former, as the frustrating difficulty of making real change is one of the major themes of a story that takes place during his first presidential election campaign. Warren (Edward Dede) is a black, gay, Buddhist university graduate who joins the campaign's New York headquarters but is quickly shipped off to a strategically important, but difficult voting ward: East Cleveland could be a major part of winning the crucial Ohio vote. An almost exclusively poor black neighbourhood, it ought to be an easy sell, but many residents aren't registered to vote at all, and those that are still view Obama with suspicion, as a white man in black man's clothing.