Theatre review: Northanger Abbey

It's no great insight to say people in this country, and probably most of the world, love Jane Austen's stories in the original novels and the many stage and screen adaptations, but maybe we love metatextual Austen just as much: We've had Lost In Austen, The Watsons, and now Zoe Cooper's queered-up interpretation of the beloved author's swipe at the lurid gothic novels that were all the rage in her day: Northanger Abbey isn't the most famous of the books - it was one I never got round to reading, and I don't think I've even seen an adaptation before, given how unfamiliar the story was to me. Then again I'm sure some of the places Cooper takes her heroine would have been unfamiliar to the 18th century author herself, if not outright sent her straight to her fainting couch. Stripped down to a three-person show, Cooper puts Catherine Morland, aka Cath (Rebecca Banatvala) in charge of telling us her own story.

Stage-to-screen review: OUTSIDE

Well, we can add another authentic theatre experience to the streaming equivalent: Those times a show has to be interrupted due to a technical hitch (and you're not sure how long it'll take to fix, should you go to the loo in case the show overruns a lot, or will you be out of your seat when it starts again?) Following last month's INSIDE, the Orange Tree live stream returns with a second trio of new short plays - this time all written by people who've worked at the venue before, if not necessarily as a writer. Unsurprisingly the theme this time is OUTSIDE, and Sonali Bhattacharyya's Two Billion Beats interprets this as a school playground, where star pupil Asha (Zainab Hasan) is uncharacteristically having to clean up graffiti as detention, while her little sister Bettina (Ashna Rabheru) loiters, not wanting to get on the bus alone and get bullied. Unfortunately I can't critique Two Billion Beats as Hasan's microphone failed just as we were getting to the crux of the play, so I didn't hear most of her dialogue from that point on; but the start did seem promising, with Asha comparing her school essay-writing technique to clickbait that gets her teacher hooked.

Theatre review: Out of Water

In a South Shields school that's permanently getting "Requires Improvement" on its OFSTED reports, teacher Claire (Lucy Briggs-Owen) has been brought in to pilot an inclusion class scheme that's been successful elsewhere at turning round the fortunes of the most neglected students. It's not an obvious place for a pregnant, middle class lesbian to move to, and she's palpably nervous about how she'll be received there, but it's where her policewoman wife Kit (Zoe West) grew up, and she's convinced Claire it could be the place to start their family. Out of Water is the new play by Zoe Cooper, whose last play at the Orange Tree was Jess and Joe Forever, which means this an exciting prospect, but also has a lot to live up to. As in Cooper's earlier play this is a storytelling form of theatre, with Claire and Kit narrating fairly recent events, reliving their own part in them and taking on the other characters as needed.

Theatre review: Jess and Joe Forever

When a 9-year-old girl is caught spying on a group of skinny-dipping boys, they make fun of her until the smallest of the boys, and the only one wearing swimming trunks, distracts them by jumping out of a tree into the water. It's a little kindness that'll develop into a friendship over the next few years. Two young adult actors give convincingly wide-eyed and halting performances as the titular characters of Zoe Cooper's Jess and Joe Forever. Jess (Nicola Coughlan) is the city-girl daughter of a rich couple who've bought a cottage in a remote part of Norfolk just so they can send her there with the au pair for a couple of weeks every summer to "learn how to have a childhood." Her real holiday will be with them straight afterwards, for quality time and to brush up on her Italian language skills.

Non-review: Utopia

I can't call this a review as, for the first time this year, I couldn't handle the prospect of sitting through the whole of Utopia at Soho Theatre, so Andy and I left at the interval. Directors Steve Marmion and Max Roberts promised an ambitious project that invited a variety of writers, comedians, musicians and politicians to eschew art's tendency to look on the dark side. Instead they were to think positive and contribute their own visions of Utopia. None of this is actually apparent on stage: Instead six performers who deserve better (Tobi Bakare, Laura Elphinstone, Rufus Hound, Pamela Miles, Sophia Myles, David Whitaker) struggle through a substandard student revue, in which a number of sketches are split up and presented in installments over a long, boring, unfunny first hour. I struggled to see what most of them had to do with the subject matter; the rest tackled Utopia from a uniformly bleak perspective of how unattainable it, or anything close to it, is.