Theatre review: Heather

Déjà vu on the way into the Bush's studio space, where Lily Arnold's sparse design gives us a desk with the script on it, with chairs and microphones for two performers. But where Nassim was largely about revealing truths about the writer's life, Thomas Eccleshare's Heather is about a fictional writer - one whose fictions extend further than it first appears. Harry (Ashley Gerlach) is an editor who thinks he's discovered the next J.K. Rowling in Heather (Charlotte Melia,) who's emailed him the first volume of her children's fantasy trilogy. The book is picked up and published without the two ever meeting, Heather at first being pregnant, then getting a terminal cancer diagnosis. But as the series becomes a sensation the press and public get curious about the elusive author, and Heather's excuses for staying in the shadows start sounding more and more desperate.

Theatre review: Perle

Papa-papa-papa-papa, papapa, papa-papa-papa-papa... pa! OK, so this Pearl doesn't actually come with a Dean, but it does come with one of those people I'd never heard of a year ago only for them to become suddenly prolific. Thomas Eccleshare's talents include acting, writing and looking like a toothy Ben Affleck, and he does all three in solo show Perle, loosely based on one of the oldest extant poems in the English language. The publicity rather bravely/foolishly uses the word "mime," and those potential audience members not scared away screaming by this prospect will indeed see Eccleshare spend an almost-silent hour on stage. But instead of an invisible box for him to get stuck in he has a real one, in the form of an old-fashioned large-screen television centre stage, complete with VCR underneath it and piles of VHS tapes scattered around the floor.