Theatre review:Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

It's billed as an adaptation of a novel, but Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky actually turns out to be three of them, a trilogy of interconnected stories about working class Londoners in the 1920s. It means Simon Reade's adaptation of them into a single two-hour show can be called brave at the very least, possibly foolhardy - it does explain something about the rather stilted evening we end up with, always hovering on the edge of something charming but never really getting there. At the centre of the story is a pub, The Midnight Bell, and two of the bar staff: Bob (Jordan Scowen) has been carefully building up his savings, but his inability to stand back when someone he cares about is in need means he's lately become prone to sudden acts of generosity, handing out cash to people like his longtime friend and coworker Ella (Rosalind Lailey.)

Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise -Cactus / Rosewater

The last time I caught up with The Beast Will Rise, the fourteenth play in the series, Cactus, had had its online premiere postponed, taking the opportunity of one of last year's brief returns of live performance to debut in front of an audience instead. I hadn't looked at Tramp's YouTube page for a while, but with Philip Ridley's first new work of 2021 coming soon I had a look, and it seems that Cactus had quietly arrived online a few months ago, along with a new fifteenth instalment. Ridley's monologue cycle for Zoom, directed by Wiebke Green, was something of an underrated epic of the first lockdown - you can read my reviews of the first, second and third sets of monologues I watched, and I think this fourth one will be the last... but with a playwright as prolific as Ridley you never know when something else might pop up.