Theatre review: The Prudes

The characters in writer-director Anthony Neilson’s The Prudes know they’re in a play called The Prudes, and they resent the implication somewhat – although Jess (Sophie Russell) thinks it might be fair in the sense that she doesn’t like the idea of dogging (she worries about the dogs being left alone while all the sex is going on and anyway, she doesn’t have a car.) But it’s true that she and her partner of nine years, James (Jonjo O’Neill,) haven’t had sex in 14 months, and they’re here to do something about it. Specifically, they’re here in Fly Davis’ chintzy pink boudoir set to have sex in front of a live audience. But first they need to introduce themselves and give some background to their relationship and its recent intimacy issues – basically, they need to keep talking about anything that’ll put off doing the act itself.

Theatre review: Nine Night

Actor Natasha Gordon’s accomplished first play Nine Night takes its name from a Jamaican funeral custom: The wake takes place over nine nights, with a series of boisterous parties in honour of the deceased; on the final night their spirit is encouraged to move on. In another case of a play arriving at a time that makes it accidentally topical, we’re in the house of a woman from the Windrush generation, Gloria, who’s just died of cancer. Nine Night is an ensemble piece but at the heart of it is Gloria’s younger daughter Lorraine (Franc Ashman,) who took voluntary redundancy to care for her mother during her final months, and has now been left in charge of the funeral arrangements, and of keeping up with the food and drink demands of a regular stream of guests. We only hear the parties in the background; the action takes place in the kitchen, still done up in 1970s style (set design by Rajha Shakiry.)

Theatre review: Masterpieces

Anger can be a spur to some powerful writing, but while anger over the relationship between pornography and misogyny is more than justifiable, I’ve yet to see it be the basis of a coherent piece of theatre. The Finborough proves that #MeToo isn’t the first time theatre has fought back against the oppression of women by dusting off Sarah Daniels’ 1983 play Masterpieces, which tries to trace a line from misogynistic jokes all the way to the murder of women. It starts promisingly enough with the standard dinner party from hell: Olivia Darnley and Edward Killingback (Yeah!) Them Motherfuckers Don’t Know How To Act (Yeah!) play Rowena and Trevor, whose dinner with friends and family degenerates into a series of sexist jokes. This scene actually contains some really good moments about the way men silence women, that could have come straight out of the Q&A scene in The Writer – like Yvonne (Tessie Orange-Turner) being asked why she hasn’t said much, and having Trevor jump in to answer for her that she hasn’t been able to get a word in edgeways.

Theatre review: The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, or, The Beau Defeated

Restoration comedy has been having a moment lately, and after the efforts of Southwark Playhouse and the Donmar Warehouse comes the RSC to provide the element that's been missing so far: A production that actually works as a comedy. Mary Pix's The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, more commonly known as The Beau Defeated, has as daft and convoluted a plot as any in the genre but crucially, in Jo Davies' production at least, it's possible to actually follow. There's a few different plot strands, all revolving around people trying to find a partner and/or a fortune, but the two main ones follow two women looking for husbands based on very different criteria. Sophie Stanton plays the titular Mrs Rich, widow of a banker and, in a bit of character naming that's painfully on-the-nose even by Restoration comedy standards, she's very rich. But in 1700 as in 2018 banking isn't the most beloved of professions, so the way she got her money means the society ladies she wants to mingle with look down on her.

Theatre review: Absolute Hell

It takes a certain amount of confidence to call a play Absolute Hell, given the likelihood it’ll end up doing the reviewers’ job for them; of course Rodney Ackland’s 1945 play, not produced until 1952, was originally called The Pink Room, which is only going to result in people like me saying something vague and misinformed about vaginas, so maybe titles were just never his forte. Set shortly after VE Day and either side of the General Election that would put Labour in power, Absolute Hell takes place in the Vie En Rose Club, a private members’ bar run, nominally – her staff regularly grumble about doing all of the work for none of the credit – by Kate Fleetwood’s Christine. A seemingly gregarious hostess with a penchant for men in uniform who tends to get as drunk as any of her customers, she really cuts a painfully lonely figure who needs the club and its clientele to keep her from despair.

Theatre review: The Writer

“I’m not sure what that was but I liked it.” That seemed to be the general impression I got from people on Twitter who’d been to see Ella Hickson’s The Writer in previews, and it’s a fair response to a metatextual headfuck of a play that challenges audiences on at least two levels: First by confronting the ongoing discussion around the status of women in the world, and as creatives in theatre in particular, and then by playing with format – but then this structural experiment also folds back into the gender discussion, providing a further looping nature to the way the play works. It plays out in five distinct acts, starting with a confrontation: A young woman (Lara Rossi) goes back into the theatre after a show to collect the bag she’s forgotten, and bumps into the play’s director (Samuel West,) who asks her what she thought.

Theatre review: The Way of the World

A delayed trip to the Donald and Margot Warehouse, where James Macdonald's production of The Way of the World has been sadly overshadowed by the reason the performance I was originally due to see was cancelled: Actor Alex Beckett's unexpected death. Performances of William Congreve's Restoration comedy have now resumed with Robin Pearce replacing Beckett as Waitwell, and the rest of the run being dedicated to the late actor's memory. Unfortunately it proves a pretty poor memorial, as Macdonald has produced an interminable, impenetrable and woefully unfunny evening whose cast try hard to inject some energy into it but only succeed in small doses. I don't think I've seen Congreve's play before but I suspect it has to take a lot of the blame itself; the lengthy first scene in which Mirabel (Geoffrey Streatfeild) and Fainall (Tom Mison) exchange exposition about numerous similarly-named characters we haven't met yet sets a lugubrious tone the rest of the play struggles to get out of, and left me none the wiser about who anyone was by the time they turned up.

Theatre review: TINA

Weeder needer nudder hero!

When I was growing up I had Tina Turner’s Private Dancer album on cassette, and there was a period when I needed to listen to it every night to get to sleep, so there are memories associated with many of her songs for me; still, making them the subject of a jukebox musical didn’t automatically appeal. But TINA has a book by Katori Hall (with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Pris) and, having waited a long time to see another play by the author of The Mountaintop, it seemed silly to miss this chance when it presented itself. And while the script isn’t going to be either Hall’s finest hour or the standout part of the evening, the show’s biographical nature means it has to have a darker edge that puts it miles away from director Phyllida Lloyd’s most famous production, Mamma Mia. It undercuts any expectations of being a singalong from the start – the opening notes of “The Best” play, but within a couple of minutes we have the first instance of violence against women.

Theatre review: The Phlebotomist

Ella Road’s imperfect but accomplished debut The Phlebotomist opens with a real piece of news footage, as a doctor is interviewed about genomics, the science of using DNA testing to predict someone’s future health; enthusiastically, she tells us how hospitals keeping records of everyone’s projected physical and mental health would be a boon to the medical profession and help treat problems before they even occur. Over the course of the next two hours we get more footage appearing on the screens with every scene change, this time scripted clips that build the dystopian future Road has created with this technology as its basis: Blood tests aren’t, at first, compulsory, but they become common and increasingly expected. The complex data collected is simplified to a score out of ten, and soon everything from job applications to dating profiles revolves around this, with anyone ranked as “sub” unlikely to get a mortgage, a decent job or a partner who isn’t as predisposed to an early death as they are.

Theatre review: Instructions for Correct Assembly

Thomas Eccleshare isn’t a playwright afraid of a high concept, or of asking his creatives for the impossible, whether it’s nature fighting back against urbanisation in a very literal way, or a Mediaeval poem turned into a live comic book. Instructions for Correct Assembly, his first play for the Royal Court’s main stage, is no different, taking the idea of the IKEA flat-pack and wondering what we could be building out of it next. Harry (Mark Bonnar) and Max’s (Jane Horrocks) son Nick (Brian Vernel) died some months ago after years of drug addiction. But the couple have found a project to help them move on with their lives, and are excited to assemble their new son Jån (also Vernel,) who’s been ordered from a generic model (“white and polite”) but can be programmed to suit their own specifications. Through a series of comic scenes they iron out the imperfections, but as time goes on they feel the need to programme some grey areas back in.

Theatre review: Périclès, Prince de Tyr (Cheek by Jowl)

Co-written with a pimp he met down the pub, and only surviving in a reconstructed version from text fragments, Pericles is not exactly one of Shakespeare's best-known plays, and in fact after tonight's performance I've now seen it as many times translated into other languages as I have in the original. The play's hero begins his journey by attempting to get a royal bride by answering a riddle; when the solution gives up a terrible secret he flees, realising that what he's learnt has put his life n danger. After a couple of shipwrecks he ends up finding then losing first a new bride and then a daughter, being betrayed by many of those he considers friends, and finding that the dead have risen. In one of my favourite endearingly batshit insane scenes in all of Shakespeare, having dug themselves into a plot hole he and Wilkins resolve it by having some pirates turn up out of nowhere to abduct the leading lady.

Theatre review: Strictly Ballroom

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Strictly Ballroom has its press night on the 24th of April.

I know it officially makes me a Bad Gay, but I haven’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s film Strictly Ballroom. This shouldn’t matter, of course, in seeing Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s stage adaptation, and there’s certainly nothing so complex about the story that you’d need to already know it going in. Still, I can’t help but feel that not already being a fan of the 1992 film – as most of tonight’s packed preview audience clearly were – meant something about Drew McOnie’s production was definitely lost on me. Scott Hastings (Jonny Labey) is an amateur ballroom dancer competing in the Australian Federation, which insists that all entrants dance only the strictly prescribed steps; this is mainly because Federation president Barry Fife (Gerard Horan) has a lucrative side-line selling instructional videos that teach the set routines. Scott isn’t satisfied with only dancing someone else’s steps though.

Theatre review: Macbeth (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Christopher Eccleston has spent so much time recently vocally trying to disassociate himself from Doctor Who that it's hard to remember he's ever done anything else. His latest role sees him return to the stage, for the first time at the RSC, to play the title role in Macbeth. As so often happens with Shakespeare plays (especially those on the syllabus) multiple productions have arrived at the same time, and this one coincides with the critically-panned version at the National. Well, Polly Findlay's production is infinitely more watchable than Rufus Norris', but in some ways is just as problematic. Right from the opening, Findlay and designer Fly Davis show they're not short of interesting ideas, as the audience enters to find King Duncan (David Acton) asleep in his bed, a trio of little girls looking on. These are the witches whose prophecies will turn the tide of the story when Macbeth and Banquo (Raphael Sowole) encounter them soon after a battle.

Theatre review: Pressure

The British obsession with the weather is a long-standing joke that gets referenced a couple of times in David Haig’s play Pressure; attempting to make a thriller out of the weather forecast – and succeeding – must be a new a twist though. Early June 1944 in a secret military base is a good setting to pull it off though: The Allied forces have been planning D-Day for 18 months, and it absolutely has to take place on Monday the 5th of June. To the best of their knowledge they’ve managed to keep the time and location of the landings a secret, but the more time passes the harder it becomes to contain leaks, and everything is set to go on General Eisenhower’s (Malcolm Sinclair) command. Everything except the weather, the one thing they can’t control, and after several weeks of summer they’re hopeful that the Channel will still be clear by Monday. But they need to get the approval of both American and British meteorologists, and the two don’t agree.

Theatre review: The Country Wife

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The production invites the official critics in tomorrow.

A man enthusiastically spreading rumours of his own impotence is the sort of thing that makes perfect sense in a Restoration comedy, and it’s the premise of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Harry Horner (Eddie Eyre) has a reputation around London for stealing other men’s wives, to the point that no woman will come near him. After a visit to France he returns a changed man, having contracted one STD too many and been castrated by a French doctor. It is, of course, a ruse; married men will enjoy patronising the eunuch and feel safe leaving their wives with him, and he can seduce them at his leisure. While he’s spending time under the table with Lady Fidget (Sarah Lam,) he’s also acquired a new admirer: Pinchwife (Richard Clews) has recently returned from the countryside, where he married the seemingly unsophisticated Margery (Nancy Sullivan.)

Theatre review: The Inheritance

While the National's production of Angels in America has been sent back home to New York, London now gets in return a play that draws inevitable comparisons to it: Matthew Lopez is in effect following the next generation of New York gay men, in an epic play that also pushes at the seven-hour mark and is split into two parts. But The Inheritance has an unexpected way of avoiding the comparison with Tony Kushner's plays, as it also has a close connection to another famous work, being a surprisingly faithful adaptation of E.M. Forster's Howards End. Forster himself appears in the play, the story's framing device seeing his ghost (Paul Hilton) lead a creative writing class of young gay men looking for a way to tell their own stories, and settling on his novel as the framework. Eric Glass (Kyle Soller) is a gay man in his mid-thirties who befriends the older Walter (Hilton,) long-term partner to a billionaire property developer.

Theatre review: Vincent River

A production of Vincent River eight years ago was one of the plays that established Philip Ridley as one of my absolute favourite playwrights, so a revival at the Park Theatre's studio space was something to get excited about. First produced in 2001 but with elements that are sadly still relevant with the rise in homophobic hate crime since the Brexit vote, the titular Vincent is what the play's characters have in common, but we never see him because he died 18 weeks earlier, beaten to death in a Shoreditch cottage. His mother Anita (Louise Jameson,) who claims never to have suspected her son's sexuality, has just moved to Dagenham to get away from the scene of the crime and the backlash from her neighbours, but she's not got away from everyone who's interested in her story - a young man has been stalking her, not particularly subtly so she's well aware he's there.

Theatre review: Kiss of the Spider Woman

Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman seems to be of endless fascination to theatremakers - I saw a stage version at the Donmar Warehouse in 2007, and there also exists a notoriously Marmite Kander and Ebb musical on the subject. But for the Menier Chocolate Factory production, Laurie Sansom uses another new adaptation, by Motorcycle Diaries screenwriter José Rivera and American playwright Allan Baker. The setting is a jail cell in 1970s Argentina, a time when the junta regularly imprisoned and tortured political dissidents like Valentin (Declan Bennett.) He shares this space with Molina (Samuel Barnett,) a gay window dresser convincted of gross indecency. The two have little in common, but bond when Molina starts to tell his cellmate bedtime stories to help him sleep.

Theatre review: Caroline, or Change

Daniel Evans' first season in charge of Chichester has already suggested he'll be following his predecessor in transferring a lot of shows to the West End: Quiz and King Lear are on their way, and Michael Longhurst's production of Caroline, or Change will follow them in the autumn, but first it has a sold-out run at Hampstead. Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's musical, loosely inspired by Kushner's childhood and his family's maid, takes place in 1963 Louisiana, where Caroline Thibodeaux (Sharon D. Clarke) spends her days doing laundry in the sweltering basement of the Gellman family. Unlike most of the local maids, she wears her exhaustion and anger at hard work for little pay openly, which has got her a reputation as being particularly unfriendly and unlikeable. But the Gellmans' young son Noah (Aaron Gelkoff, alternating with Charlie Gallacher,) adores her, especially since his mother's death from cancer.

Theatre review: Humble Boy

I didn't catch Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy when it premiered at the National in 2001, but I've heard it mentioned a lot since as one of the best-loved new plays of the time. Paul Miller now tests how well it's aged with a revival of this gentle tragicomedy with overt Hamlet allusions. Designer Simon Daw has gone all-out in transforming the Orange Tree's in-the-round stage into the garden of Flora Humble's (Belinda Lang) Cotswolds home. Her husband has just died and her son Felix (Jonathan Broadbent) has returned after a long absence to attend the funeral, only to disappear when he was meant to be giving the eulogy. Felix is a theoretical astrophysicist who's been trying to find a unifying theory of the cosmos. His attempts to examine his inner life have been as unsuccessful as those to examine black holes, and he arrives back at the family home still in a suicidal mood.