Rehearsed reading review: Geography of Fire /La Furie et sa géographie Part One

I'd say roughly 8% of my online #brand is me grumbling at the Finborough Theatre for never bringing back Armstrong's War for a full run (yes they know, yes they'd like to, no they can't get the funding.) So in the absence of that the best I can do is check out the other Colleen Murphy plays the theatre regularly premieres in the hope that she's got another gem up her sleeve. This year's Vibrant Festival includes a rehearsed reading of another of her works to deal with war, but on a much more epic scale - in fact the three hours plus of Geography of Fire / La Furie et sa géographie that we get here is only Part One of a planned two-parter. The website blurb says the play stands alone in its own right, but I'd argue there's too many threads left hanging at the end to really call it a complete story, not least of all that the battle at the centre of the play has only just about got started by the curtain call. Specifically the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham near Quebec during the Seven Years' War.

Rehearsed reading review: The Wooden Meadow

I should be at the Finborough Theatre a fair bit in the next week, because as well as their regular Tuesday-Sunday show it’s also time for the annual Vibrant Festival of new writing, and for the first time in a few years I can make a couple of rehearsed readings I was interested in. First up Stewart Pringle, who was Artistic Director of the Old Red Lion pub theatre for three years, has written a play about a pub theatre that’s not too far from Sadler’s Wells and may or may not have a slightly laissez-faire attitude towards fire safety laws*. The protagonist of The Wooden Meadow has been running the place for a bit longer than three years – Jim (Ian Redford) has been there since at least the late eighties, when he had a few big successes with new writing, including the bizarre-sounding war epic the play is named after. Audiences have long since dropped off though, budgets are non-existent and the brewery demands heavy footfall or it’ll turn the space into a function room, but Jim ploughs on.

Non-review: Rough Cuts - Bytes

Not a review as this is the return of the Royal Court's occasional series of rehearsed readings and works-in-progress, Rough Cuts. This time around, established playwrights have been given the remit of touching on issues of technology and the internet. Jack Bence, Mandeep Dhillon, Malachi Kirby, Rebecca Night, Sarah Woodward and Al Weaver perform the four shorts collected as Bytes, performed in the Wilson Studio - a small rehearsal room behind Sloane Square tube station.

Alia Bano starts us off with a play set in a high school, where a handsome new teacher (Weaver) catches the eye of one of his students (Night.) There's a familiar story of accusation and rumours to be told but modern technology gives it a new twist: The girl suddenly has a naked photo of Mr Burns she says he sent her, but this happens to be just after she learned how to hack into locked Facebook accounts.

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - Across Oka

Word of mouth must have got out for the Royal Court's Playwright's Playwrights season of Friday afternoon readings at the Duke of York's, as its final installment was reasonably well-attended despite having probably the least starry cast of all the plays featured. The play itself might have been expected to keep people away as well, since David Eldridge is the last playwright asked to choose and direct one of the works that inspired him, and somewhat inevitably he's plumped for Robert Holman, whose Making Noise Quietly baffled, bored and irritated audiences in equal measure when it was revived at the Donmar a couple of months ago. The play Eldridge has chosen is another 1980s piece with themes of war at its heart, Across Oka, Holman's quietly tragic culture clash between East and West during the (by now thawing) Cold War.

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - Abide With Me

In the series' third week it's Roy Williams' turn to choose his "playwright's playwright," and he opts for Barrie Keeffe, whose work he says showed him that theatre was the right medium for him to tell stories of working-class people. Williams directs a rehearsed reading of Abide With Me, the middle play of Keeffe's 1977 Barbarians trilogy. The turnout this afternoon at the Duke of York's was better than for the first play, but unsurprisingly not on a par with last week's invasion of Cumberfans. Of course, for the sort of people who booked these readings long before the casts were announced, today's lineup of Daniel Kaluuya and Sam Swann is starry enough anyway. (The third cast member, Morgan Watkins, I don't think I've seen on stage before, although his face seems familiar from TV - I'm pretty sure he was in the most recent series of Silk.)

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - Look Back in Anger

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is surely the best-known of the four "Playwright's Playwrights" readings being presented by the Royal Court at the Duke of York's. It's so iconic that despite hot having seen it on stage before, the first act especially was very familiar to me, and I know I'm not the only person who found that to be the case. (In fact this familiarity did mean this week's reading lacked one of the joys of last week's, of the cast discovering the play as the audience do.) But the reason the theatre was, in stark contrast to last week's sparse but enthusiastic crowd, packed to the rafters today wasn't entirely to do with the play: It had been announced that Benedict Cumberbatch would play the archetypal Angry Young Man, Jimmy Porter, and St Martin's Lane was packed with fans long before kick-off. Jimmy lives in a small apartment with wife Alison (Rebecca Hall) and their friend Cliff (handsome Welshman Matt Ryan.) These two help each other bear the brunt of Jimmy's constant furious outbursts, taking out his frustrations about life in general on the pair of them. The combination of Alison becoming pregnant, and the arrival of her old friend Helena (Anna Maxwell Martin) coming to visit, effects a change in the status quo.

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - The Starry Messenger

I'm not calling this a review as this was a one-off rehearsed reading, not a full production. While the Royal Court are at the Duke of York's Theatre, they're holding a short series of Friday afternoon readings they're calling "Playwright's Playwrights." Four Royal Court playwrights each select one of their favourite plays, and direct a rehearsed reading of it. First up is Nick Payne, who chooses Kenneth Lonergan's The Starry Messenger, which hasn't actually had a UK production yet. Set in mid-90s New York, just as a beloved old planetarium is about to be demolished and replaced with a shiny new one, it charts a brief affair between a married astronomy lecturer and a single mother. Mark (Ben Miles) teaches a weekly evening class in astronomy for beginners, his rather dry lectures punctuated by laughter from the neighbouring classroom of his more charismatic, proactive colleague Arnold (Felix Scott.) His life at home with wife Anna (Monica Dolan) seems about as lifeless as his classes. Then trainee nurse Angela (Daisy Haggard) visits the planetarium to find out about classes for her young son, and the two strike up a relationship.

Non-review: Where the Shot Rabbits Lay

Again, not a review as Brad Birch's Where the Shot Rabbits Lay is not a fully-staged play but the last rehearsed reading in this year's Young Writers Festival (I really want there to be an apostrophe in there somewhere but there isn't) at the Royal Court; although director Nick Bagnall allows his cast to act out some of the action, with the odd prop thrown in.

Birch's short play (I also saw an in-development work by the writer here last year) is a father-son bonding moment, as a Man (Nicolas Tennant) and surly 13-year-old Boy (Lewis Lempereur-Palmer) go camping for a weekend. Following his divorce, the father is keen to make a connection with his son and, he hopes, impart a bit of wisdom if he has any. Though things don't end up going as smoothly as he might hope, the two do end up improving their relationship a bit by the end. Along the way there's confrontations and a lot of witty lines which Tennant times beautifully even with script in hand. Quite a sweet, entertaining playlet, on the strength of this I'd go see full-length work from Birch.

Where the Shot Rabbits Lay by Brad Birch is booking until the 14th of April at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Running time: 45 minutes straight through.

Non-review: Ain't No Law Against Fish 'n' Chips

NOTE: I'm not going to do a proper review as this is a rehearsed reading, not a full production.

Definitely a themed week for me: Third trip to the Royal Court, which for the third time takes us to Essex (Dagenham this time, we're really getting the tour) and even the second rendition of West Ham anthem "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles." As part of its Young Writers Festival which has already given us Goodbye To All That and covered the building in "100-word plays" the Court is also presenting a handful of rehearsed readings of other plays submitted to the Festival, each getting two performances, and I decided to try and make it to a couple. Rose Lewenstein's Ain't No Law Against Fish 'n' Chips is directed by Richard Twyman, with a cast of Danny Worters, Tobi Bakare and Amelia Lowdell, and concerns two teenage boys who live on the same estate and have been best friends for years. Soon after his first failed job application Pete (Worters) meets some members of the English Defence League, who convince him the reason he missed out on a job was a stealth Muslim invasion, and Pete immediately begins to join them on marches and espouse the EDL's beliefs. The resurgent far right wing was a popular subject for theatre a couple of years ago. Lewenstein's play is a pretty straightforward affair and serves its purpose of showing off her writing ability, especially her good ear for dialogue. With a number of more complex plays on similar themes having been seen in London relatively recently, I'm not sure there's any real market for it beyond this kind of showcase though.

Ain't No Law Against Fish 'n' Chips by Rose Lewenstein is booking until the 10th of March at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes straight through.