Theatre review: Albion

When Rupert Goold first took over the Almeida, he launched with a Mike Bartlett play that took inspiration from Shakespeare, to great effect; now they reunite to channel Chekhov. Naming a play Albion in 2017 is a pretty big clue that this is Bartlett's Brexit play, and it takes very little time for the metaphor to reveal itself: It may not be subtle but it's very good. Audrey (Victoria Hamilton) is the self-made owner of a chain of luxury stores where "everything's white, including the customers." On discovering that an Oxfordshire country house where she spent some time as a child is up for sale, she buys it and resettles her family there without asking them. It's not the house so much as the garden she's interested in: Named Albion, it was designed in the 1920s in what was then a revolutionary new style of small, themed gardens, but has fallen into disrepair for decades. Audrey's dream is to recreate the original gardener's vision, even if it alienates first everyone in the village, then everyone she knows.

Theatre review: Love, Love, Love

Having premiered in a touring production a couple of years ago, Mike Bartlett's tragicomic Love, Love, Love finally makes it to London in a new production at the Royal Court. Looking at the "baby boomer" generation that now famously made more money than both their parents and their children, it follows Kenneth (Ben Miles) and Sandra's (Victoria Hamilton) relationship from the 1960s to the present day. We first meet Ken as a teenage student, living in his stuffy, old-fashioned older brother Henry's flat. When Henry (Sam Troughton) brings home the girl he's been seeing, the hippieish, feminist Sandra takes more of a liking to his Beatles-loving little brother, and they bond over "All You Need Is Love" (according to Ian, the people sitting behind us were muttering in surprise that the song echoes the repeated word of the title, as if Bartlett might have named his play by accident.) A little over twenty years on we find the pair married, with two teenage kids who will very literally get caught in the middle of their parents' crumbling relationship.