Theatre review: The White Factory

Created by Russian Jewish theatremakers who've been targeted because of their opposition to the war in Ukraine, Dmitry Glukhovsky's The White Factory looks back at the Second World War, and a group of people whose story I don't think I've seen foregrounded before: You sometimes hear of the Jewish collaborators who helped the Nazis control and eventually round up their own people, in the hope that they and their families might get favourable treatment. They tend to be offered up as a cautionary tale, as their stories generally ended in the concentration camps like everyone else's, but Glukhovsky offers - if not an unquestioningly sympathetic view - a more nuanced one. The story of Yosef Kaufman (Mark Quartley) is equally charged with a steely survival instinct, and crippling survivor's guilt.

Theatre review: Dead Dad Dog

John McKay's short play Dead Dad Dog was a hit in Edinburgh in 1988, leading to a quick London transfer to the Royal Court. Liz Carruthers' revival at the Finborough was meant to be the opener in a double bill, as McKay has written a present-day sequel, but due to cast illness the latter has had to be cancelled, leaving us with just the original, a slight supernatural comedy in which 22-year-old Alec (Angus Miller) is preparing for a big day: An interview for an apprenticeship as a BBC Scotland producer, followed by a hot date. But his preparations are interrupted by the arrival of his father Willie (Liam Brennan,) who died 12 years earlier. The ghost has been sent back from heaven for a short while to spend time with his son - he didn't request the visit and doesn't know why he was granted it. Alec is saddled with a ghost who to all intents and purposes seems alive - everyone can see him, and he'll need feeding.

Theatre review: What It Means

American screenwriter, journalist and novelist Merle Miller became a major figure in the gay rights movement largely - if this adaptation of his most famous essay and subsequent memoir is to be believed - by accident. A decorated World War II veteran who'd been blacklisted by McCarthyites and returned his medals in protest at the Vietnam War, he'd been a fervent but understated kind of radical. When James Corley’s What It Means first joins him, he’s holed up in his rural New York State house on the day of one of the first post-Stonewall gay rights marches in Manhattan: It’s close enough for him to join easily, but he doesn’t think that’s his kind of activism. But in 1970 Harper’s Magazine, of which he’d been editor before getting, he implies, pushed out, publishes a lengthy article about sexuality by a straight writer.

Theatre review: Octopolis

Seafood enthusiast Marek Horn follows up a play about tuna with a play about an octopus, and the people whose fascination with the molluscs becomes indistinguishable from love. In Octopolis George (Jemma Redgrave) is a scientist grieving her husband and research partner, with whom she developed theories about whether the notoriously solitary cephalopods might have a previously unknown social side. Since her husband's death, she's retreated into her living room with Frances, the octopus in a tank they were studying, and had made some potentially extraordinary discoveries on; she's not entirely unaware that she treats Frances as a way of still feeling connected to him. The house George lives in belongs to a University, and she's been too preoccupied to wonder why they've let her stay there since she stopped her teaching and research.

Theatre review: Imposter 22

In Vicky Featherstone's final year at the Royal Court, getting a group who aren't generally represented on stage to unleash chaos in the Downstairs theatre seems to be a recurring theme: Earlier this year it was the underground drag scene that took over the stage, now it's the culmination of a five-year project to have neurodiverse and learning disabled creatives develop and perform a new piece. Created by Kirsty Adams, Cian Binchy, Housni Hassan (DJ), Dayo Koleosho, Stephanie Newman, Lee Phillips and Charlene Salter, written by Molly Davies and directed by Hamish Pirie, Imposter 22 announces itself as a murder mystery. The credited creators (plus Anna Constable, who’s normally Newman’s alternate but tonight read in for an indisposed Adams,) start pretty close to reality, playing a neurodiverse and learning disabled drama group.

Theatre review: Vanya

For the third play Simon Stephens has written specifically for Andrew Scott to perform, they've turned to Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, here retitled Vanya. If that suggests a laser focus on the title character it's actually quite the opposite: Stephens has turned it into something between a monologue and a one-man show, with Scott playing all the roles. I say monologue because there's more speeches being delivered straight to the audience than in the original, but the actor also has to interact with himself a lot: He plays Ivan (the character names have been mostly anglicised - he's only referred to by the eponymous nickname once,) who's been running his late sister Anna's farm most of his life; as well as his niece Sonia, and Michael, the alcoholic doctor she's unrequitedly in love with.

Theatre review: The Changeling

Ricky Dukes is a fun director, but he does seem incredibly keen on filling small stages with huge furniture, then letting his casts loose to try and manoeuvre their way around it: In last year's Doctor Faustus it was a maze of big wooden desks that everyone was banging their shins against; for this year's return to The Little with The Changeling they're trying to squeeze around a boardroom table, with Colette O'Rourke's Beatrice-Joanna at one point getting stuck when her hooped wedding dress swallowed an office chair. I haven’t seen Succession (it’s not on any of my streaming services, I’m not being a hipster about it,) but I assume that like a lot of recent shows that’s the visual reference that Sorcha Corcoran’s design is making.

Theatre review: Operation Epsilon

I've talked before about how similar, highly specific ideas seem to crop up on different stages around the same time, but this is a whole new level of specificity: Alan Brody's Operation Epsilon is the true story of the German nuclear scientists who were captured by Allied forces near the end of the Second World War, and held at an English country pile so that the British and Americans could ascertain just how close the Nazis had come to developing nuclear weapons. And yes, this is based directly on the men's actual conversations, recorded by the military in secret. If I sound like I'm repeating myself it's because that was also the premise of Katherine Moar's Farm Hall, which I was a big fan of when it premiered about six months ago. I guess you can blame Oppenheimer for everyone deciding the other side of the story would hook audiences.

Theatre review: anthropology

After a quiet summer Hampstead Theatre kicks off its new season with anthropology, Lauren Gunderson's play that takes the very topical subject of AI and... well, it's not particularly clear what, if anything, it does with it. Angie (Dakota Blue Richards) has been missing, presumed dead, since she disappeared at college a couple of years ago in a suspected kidnapping. Her sister Merrill (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) is a Something Something Computers, who is processing the loss by creating an algorithm that's been fed all the digital information Angie left behind, and as the play begins she switches it on for the first time, finding that - apart from being a bit nicer than the real thing - the digital version is an uncannily accurate representation that seems to know her sister in ways even her programmer doesn't.

Theatre review: untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play

Arriving on the Young Vic stage in a blaze of chaos to match the flurry of asterisks in its title, Kimber Lee's untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is an Asian-American actress' equal parts angry, exhausted and exasperated look at the stereotypes around East Asian women that have persisted in Western art for at least a century, and one story in particular that won't go away. And although the version hiding in plain sight in the title is the one that's most notoriously caused controversy (especially on Broadway,) Lee's metatheatrical version of the story takes us back to the original, and walks us through Puccini's tragic opera Madama Butterfly. An ebullient narrator (Rochelle Rose) breathlessly takes us through the tale of Kim (Mei Mac,) a Japanese peasant girl whose mother (Lourdes Faberes) convinces her the way ahead is to seduce and marry an American sailor.

Theatre review: Pygmalion

Future Dame Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel both return to the Old Vic to pair up as Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins in Bernard Shaw's* Pygmalion, in a typically stylised Richard Jones production that reveals the play as a dark comedy. It doesn't need to reveal its social and political concerns - compared to its more famous musical adaptation, Shaw's play lays those bare pretty forcefully itself. Ferran's Eliza is a flower-girl in Covent Garden who tries to sell to middle-class theatregoers on their way home, and when her basket of flowers is knocked to the ground she unleashes her loud cockney accent, strangled vowels and tendency to express her emotions through random wailing noises. This happens to be in front of the first chance meeting between two celebrated linguists with an interest in regional accents and dialects.

Theatre review: It's Headed Straight Towards Us

Closing off what's been a very strong week of theatre for me is a fairly starry premiere for the Park Theatre: Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer are the writers of disaster comedy It's Headed Straight Towards Us and I did wonder more than once if this was a project that the writers had been working on for a while, perhaps with the original intention of performing it themselves - I could certainly see Edmondson in the role that's ended up going to Rufus Hound. The setting is the luxury trailer of C-list actor Hugh (Samuel West,) never the most celebrated actor of his generation (no knighthood, only an MBE,) but having made a good living for himself in recent years as the butler to a volcano god in a cheesy but wildly successful action movie franchise. The latest installment is being filmed on the side of an actual Icelandic volcano*.

Theatre review: Beautiful Thing

Not that I've been at this for a while or anything, but you can read a review of the 20th anniversary production of Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing on this blog, and now here's the 30th anniversary one, and a fresh look at the play that's in essence one that knows the script's strengths and plays to them. The fresh look is in the casting, which director Anthony Simpson-Pike wanted to allow young gay black kids to see themselves reflected in the characters. The only change I noticed in the script was a quick reference where Sandra asks Jamie if he's being bullied racially. Other than that the story's still as written, and very much in the early Nineties - in fairness I'm not sure how you could try to update jokes about Wincey Willis, let alone the specific point of gay history that inspired Harvey to write this rainbow-tinted play.

Theatre review: Mlima's Tale

Theatres really make it hard for me to keep my visits under control sometimes: Although no doubt worth seeing, Lynn Nottage's story of the ivory trade through the eyes of an elephant sounded bleak enough that it might be better to give it a miss, but then the casting for Miranda Cromwell's production was announced, and made it harder to say no. In its opening moments, Mlima's Tale gives us a bit of a misdirect that it might actually be what the title promises, as Mlima (Ira Mandela Siobhan,) a 48-year-old bull elephant, begins to give us a potted history of his life, the rainy seasons he's seen, the children he's sired. But these are the final moments of his life before he's brutally killed by poachers - after numerous attempts evidenced by a dozen bullet scars, it's a desperate, amateurish Somali pair who finally take him down.

Theatre review: Police Cops: The Musical

A painfully silly musical spoofing 80s pop culture, whose uniformly talented cast includes an impossibly attractive man with comedy facial hair whose clothes keep falling off? Well I can't see what's in it for me. Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson, Tom Roe (book & lyrics) and Ben Adams' (music) Police Cops: The Musical is another in the long line of 1980s tributes/spoofs whose popularity doesn't seem to show any signs of fading, although you'd have to put quite a few of those other shows together to match the sheer relentless stream of gags the company (whose writer-performer trio's company also goes by Police Cops - unusually, no director is credited so presumably they're doing that as well) throw into this spoof of American cop shows and movies, and the action genre more broadly - Lethal Weapon is probably the most obvious comparison, but there's nods to Die Hard, The Karate Kid and even Back to the Future.

Theatre review: Frank and Percy

From several years - on and off - of the violent teenage musical shenanigans of Heathers resident on its main stage, it's a major change of pace as Ben Weatherill's Frank and Percy comes to London via Windsor and Bath. The gentle romantic comedy has been well-received on those earlier runs but what made a London transfer almost inevitable was the star casting of the titular pair: Roger Allam is Frank, widowed a couple of years earlier, and with little left to comfort him in his retirement other than his spoilt dog. It's on one of their visits to Hampstead Heath that he meets fellow dog-walker Percy (Ian McKellen,) and they strike up some small talk (the play was partly inspired by the way dog-walkers during lockdown found that chatting to each other became a treasured social interaction.)

Theatre review: That Face

Launching her career as the watersports fetishist's favourite playwright, Polly Stenham's That Face wasn't just famous for Matt Smith's Astonishing Coup de Théâtre^TM but also for the fact that it was written when she was 19. Exposing the extreme dysfunction of the sort of rich, upper-middle class people who would describe themselves as merely "comfortable," it begins with Mia (Ruby Stokes) getting sent home from boarding school for taking part in a hazing ritual - a ritual she decided to spice up a bit by slipping the 13-year-old victim with Valium she stole from her mother's stash, putting the girl in hospital. Mia's father is returning from Hong Kong to bribe the school into not expelling her, but his imminent arrival means he'll also check in on her mother.

Theatre review: Infamous

For a small studio theatre, albeit a very central one, Jermyn Street Theatre gets to premiere new work by some well-known playwrights; although on recent form there does seem to be a reason these particular works don't find a more mainstream home. The latest is April De Angelis, whose Infamous is a weirdly unenthusiastic look at Georgian celebrity (and regular Blackadder punchline) Emma Hamilton. We first meet Emma (Rose Quentin) in 1798, the young wife of the septuagenarian ambassador to Naples. A former prostitute who climbed the social ladder as mistress to various powerful men, she's already achieved some notoriety as a close friend of the Neapolitan royals, whose influence makes her husband favour them over his own country's interests. But it's nothing compared to the infamy she's got planned.

Theatre review: The Little Big Things

Back to @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's kept its tamagotchi alive for a whole two weeks, and the new West End venue's first musical. Nick Butcher (music & lyrics,) Tom Ling (lyrics) and Joe White's (book) The Little Big Things is based on the autobiography of artist Henry Fraser, who is paralysed from the shoulders down and paints using a stylus he holds in his mouth. A promising teenage rugby player, Fraser was 17 when he had an accident on holiday in Portugal with his older brothers (Jamie Chatterton and Cleve September) that saw him flown back to England and to the hospital where he spent several months. The show is narrated by two versions of Henry that talk to each other in his head: The able-bodied Henry from before the accident (Jonny Amies) and the Henry after it, in a wheelchair (Ed Larkin.)

Theatre review: Birthright

T.C. Murray's 1910 play Birthright is apparently inspired by the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, so I assume I don't need to say anything more about the plot. No? OK, it's set on a farm in rural Ireland where Bat (Pádraig Lynch) and Maura Morrissey (Rosie Armstrong) have two grown-up sons: Hugh (Thomas Fitzgerald) is his mother's favourite, the sportsman, poet and scholar with an interest in current affairs and the wider world. Shane (Peter Broderick) is the born farmer, and therefore his father's favourite. In fact it's not so much that Bat likes Shane more, as it is that he hates Hugh with a fiery vengeance, basically for taking after his mother more than him. Still, Hugh's the oldest, and therefore Bat has always sworn that the farm will be left to him, while Shane, who's been keeping the place going for the last few years, is planning to emigrate to America in a few days' time.