Theatre review: The Inheritance

While the National's production of Angels in America has been sent back home to New York, London now gets in return a play that draws inevitable comparisons to it: Matthew Lopez is in effect following the next generation of New York gay men, in an epic play that also pushes at the seven-hour mark and is split into two parts. But The Inheritance has an unexpected way of avoiding the comparison with Tony Kushner's plays, as it also has a close connection to another famous work, being a surprisingly faithful adaptation of E.M. Forster's Howards End. Forster himself appears in the play, the story's framing device seeing his ghost (Paul Hilton) lead a creative writing class of young gay men looking for a way to tell their own stories, and settling on his novel as the framework. Eric Glass (Kyle Soller) is a gay man in his mid-thirties who befriends the older Walter (Hilton,) long-term partner to a billionaire property developer.

Theatre review: Richard III (Almeida)

In his first new Shakespeare production since leaving the RSC, Rupert Goold takes on a (mostly) modern-dress Richard III that opens by reminding us of the recent discovery of the real Richard's remains under a car park in Leicester. As the famously curved spine is taken out of the ground, Ralph Fiennes' Richard stands over his own grave to deliver the "Now is the winter of our discontent" speech. A woman a few seats away from me was trying (and failing) before the show to get me to agree that this overt reference to recent events was patronising. In fact the idea of bones being exhumed and reburied becomes central to Hildegard Bechtler's design - the body of the late Henry VI is now a skeleton* about to be reinterred, while for every death Richard causes on his way to the throne, a skull is illuminated on the back wall.

Non-review: Much Ado About Nothing (Old Vic)

The "nothing" in Much Ado About Nothing has been ascribed many punning meanings. It was Elizabethan slang for "vagina," which fits in with the sexual deceit at the heart of the plot. Less interesting people insist it's in fact a pun on "noting," meaning gossip. Mark Rylance's production at the Old Vic has found a whole new relevance to "nothing," as the answer to the question "how much of the script will James Earl Jones have memorised by the first preview?" A few weeks on and Jones has at least managed to keep the blank pauses to a minimum, but frankly knowing what the words are seems irrelevant in a production when they're often inaudible, and when they can be heard they're being thrown away. Regular readers of this blog will both know a "not-review" is when I want to comment on a show but feel something makes me unqualified to call it a review. Very rarely, that something is me leaving at the interval.