Theatre review: Sea Creatures

One of the more baffling and dreamlike plays I've seen in a while, Cordelia Lynn's Sea Creatures seems to have a solid enough setting: A holiday home on an unnamed part of the British coast, where a noted academic brings her family every summer. Shirley (Geraldine Alexander) was the youngest woman ever to be awarded a professorship at her university, but she hasn't published anything for a decade and has become vague and distracted - she's sometimes described as not being able to tell the difference between animate and inanimate objects. Her partner Sarah (Thusitha Jayasundera) is an artist; no matter what the subject of her art is meant to be, she always ends up with a painting of a lobster. Shirley's eldest daughter George (Pearl Chanda) is heavily pregnant but not happy about it, and responds angrily to anyone who points it out, while youngest daughter Toni (Grace Saif) is a childlike 22-year-old.

Theatre review:Wickies: The Vanishing Men of Eilean Mòr

My eccentric reasons for booking shows can result in some disastrous choices as well as unearthing some hidden gems. The fact that I realised I could see both the gays from Two Doors Down on stage in consecutive shows led me to a couple of twists on traditional seasonal stories, and after something inspired in the very loosest possible sense by A Christmas Carol, it's Park Theatre's Scottish take on the traditional Christmas ghost story. But Paul Morrissey's Wickies: The Vanishing Men of Eilean Mòr takes its inspiration from a very real mystery: In 1900, three lighthouse keepers vanished without trace from the Flannan Isles, a particularly remote and dangerous part of the Outer Hebrides. Morrissey's play is only the latest in a long tradition of poems, stories and songs that have taken the mystery into the realms of folk legend.

Theatre review: Tom Fool

I can see why prolific German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz' 1978 play Tom Fool might seem ripe for revival: Its attack on capitalism dehumanising workers is particularly focused on the way it defines the roles and priorities of men and women, a relevant subject when clichés about masculinity are being interrogated. Whether that's enough to make an incredibly dry and dusty play feel worth another look in 2022 is a different story altogether. Otto (Michael Shaeffer) works on the assembly line at a BMW plant. He makes enough money to support his family and afford a few luxuries, but not so much that he doesn't need to keep an eye on the cost of everything, or treat his valuables with care: When the boss borrows his Parker pen and forgets to give it back, it's a matter for sleepless nights and worried rants to his wife for weeks.