Theatre review: The Visit, or,The Old Lady Comes To Call

After Angels in America was a transatlantic success for the National Theatre twice over, it's no surprise if they're keen to bring Tony Kushner back to their stages; the Olivier this time, and instead of an original story it's for an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's obscure 1956 play The Visit, or, The Old Lady Comes To Call; but one thing that definitely hasn't changed is Kushner's determination that, once he's got the audience through the doors, he's going to keep them there as long as humanly possible. And while it doesn't fly quite as far into the realms of magic realism as his most famous work, this play - essentially an extended fable on debt of many different kinds - is full of oddities. It takes place over a few days in 1955 in the town of Slurry, New York State, once a manufacturing hub but now collapsing, its various businesses sold up to unseen buyers and liquidated years ago, and now reduced to selling the church bells for scrap metal.

Theatre review: Caroline, or Change

Daniel Evans' first season in charge of Chichester has already suggested he'll be following his predecessor in transferring a lot of shows to the West End: Quiz and King Lear are on their way, and Michael Longhurst's production of Caroline, or Change will follow them in the autumn, but first it has a sold-out run at Hampstead. Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's musical, loosely inspired by Kushner's childhood and his family's maid, takes place in 1963 Louisiana, where Caroline Thibodeaux (Sharon D. Clarke) spends her days doing laundry in the sweltering basement of the Gellman family. Unlike most of the local maids, she wears her exhaustion and anger at hard work for little pay openly, which has got her a reputation as being particularly unfriendly and unlikeable. But the Gellmans' young son Noah (Aaron Gelkoff, alternating with Charlie Gallacher,) adores her, especially since his mother's death from cancer.

Theatre review: Mother Courage and Her Children

Mother Courage is, apparently, the role Josie Lawrence has most wanted to play her whole career, and now she's got the chance she doesn't waste it, bringing a whole new level of nuance to Bertolt Brecht's antiheroine. Hannah Chissick's production of Mother Courage and Her Children at Southwark Playhouse uses the Tony Kushner translation from the last National Theatre outing, right down to the Duke Special versions of the songs that intermittently break into the narrative. Nominally set during the Thirty Years War, allowing for an epic scope both in time and ranging across Northern Europe, the play follows Lawrence’s Anna “Courage” Fierling as she travels from battlefield to battlefield, lugging a cart filled with food, drink and random provisions she sells to the desperate soldiers. She’s come to dread the possibility of peace, as war is what her entire livelihood depends on.

Theatre review: Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes Part 2: Perestroika

Previously, on Angels in America...

I can joke but while I may have seen the two parts of Angels in America a week apart, Phill, who could only get tickets two months apart, wondered if he'd need a "Previously..." at the start of Part 2 to refresh his memory. And it turns out the National have thought of people in that predicament, as my reminder email about Perestroika included a short YouTube video summarising the major events of Millennium Approaches. These included the brief appearance by Ethel Rosenberg (Susan Brown,) a woman convicted of treason decades earlier, whose execution Roy Cohn ensured by dubious means. Her ghost continues to appear to Cohn (Nathan Lane) as a patient, ominous harbinger of his own much slower death from AIDS. There's also a bigger role now for Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett,) who's got the unenviable job of being Cohn's nurse, and whose acidic put-downs make him the right man to stand up to the notorious lawyer's vitriol.

Theatre review: Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes Part 1: Millennium Approaches

For the second year in a row London's hottest theatre ticket, with reviews to match the level of anticipation, is an epic play in two parts with a supernatural element. But far from the obvious appeal of Harry Potter, this year it's a 25-year-old American play about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s that was the instant sell-out. Tony Kushner's Angels in America comes in at well over seven hours, the first three acts of which are haunted by a sense of dread at something apocalyptic on the way - hence its subtitle, Millennium Approaches. Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield) is a flaboyant gay man who's just found out he's got the virus. His boyfriend of a few years, Louis Ironson (James McArdle,) is still deeply in love with him but very quickly realises a fact he hates himself for: He can't handle staying with Prior to watch him get sick and die.

Theatre review: The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures

Tony Kushner's 2009 play - set two years before that - The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures gets its UK premiere at Hampstead, who've appended the alternate title iHo (you can't really tweet the whole thing, I guess.) But the full title is probably worth sticking to as the wordiness and sheer unnecessary length give a better indicator of what the play itself is like, as opposed to iHo, because it isn't actually about what would happen if Apple made prostitutes. Instead it's something of a family saga, though playing out over just a few days, set mainly in a Brooklyn brownstone that's in need of fairly regular repair but has still skyrocketed in value as the property boom gets going. Tom Piper's design puts the bare white shell of the four-story building on a revolve.

Non-review: A Bright Room Called Day

I'm not calling this a review because I can't comment on the whole show: I left at the interval. Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day was written in the 1980s, in response to Ronald Reagan barely acknowledging, let alone helping fight, the AIDS epidemic. Kushner compares the situation with the rise of Hitler in 1930s Germany: Suggesting, on the one hand, that the most dangerous periods in history are those when people get a bit too comfortably complacent in society's progress, allowing the right wing to take hold insidiously. And on the other hand, saying that regarding the Holocaust as the ultimate evil has allowed the powerful to get away with more than they should, that they escape criticism because even if they're mass-murderers, they're not quite as bad as the Nazis.

Theatre review: The Illusion

Pierre Corneille's 1636 play The Illusion, presented at Southwark Playhouse in an adaptation by Tony Kushner, is certainly unusual. A lawyer, Pridamant (James Clyde,) who long ago drove his son away and lost touch, is keen to find out what happened to him. He visits the magician Alcandre (Melanie Jessop) who promises to show him a series of illusions that'll replay various important scenes from the son's life: Penniless, Calisto (Charlie Archer) will fall for an upper-class heiress (Daisy Hughes) whose father disapproves, fight off a couple of rivals for her hand (Daniel Easton, Adam Jackson-Smith,) be caught up in the machinations of a lady's maid (Shanaya Rafaat) and have numerous affairs, leading him into dangerous adventures. But how reliable are the illusions? The characters' names have a tendency to change from one scene to the next, and if Pridamant doesn't like what he sees, the magician can make the story change direction. Is she just showing him what he wants to see?