Stage-to-screen review: Tartuffe (BBC iPlayer)

Next up in my digital theatre catch-up is a production I'm pretty sure I had been due to see at the RSC's Swan, but had to skip when I got ill. A couple of years later Iqbal Khan's production of Tartuffe moved up to Birmingham, where Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto's adaptation is set, and that's where it was filmed for the BBC. Molière's farce is a satire on religious hypocrisy, and here the con-man posing as a holy man becomes a fake Imam, manipulating and destroying a well-off British-Pakistani family for his own ends. In place of a servant we have a Bosnian cleaning lady, Darina (Olga Fedori,) who acts as a chorus figure and outside eye on the Pervaiz family, whose patriarch Imran (Simon Nagra) has been charmed by the wise and pious words of a seemingly homeless man he met at the mosque. He's invited him to live in the family home, and pretty soon he's reliant on Tartuffe's words for every decision he makes in his life.

Stage-to-screen review: Macbeth (See-Saw Films)

Once again a quiet August sees me throw a few screen versions of stage plays into the mix, and as the 2015 version of Macbeth is about to expire on Netflix I thought if I was going to bother with it at all I'd better get on with it. Set very much in the grubby middle ages of the story's inspiration, Justin Kurzel's film opens with the titular couple burying a child, so we can get that particular clichéd misreading of the text out of the way early on. To be fair this is only really offered as an explanation for Lady Macbeth's (Marion Cotillard) actions, as Macbeth's (Michael Fassbender) seem very much motivated by PTSD and the general bloody ruthlessness of the times: The action properly begins with the gruesome battle he leads to victory; it's actually during the battle that he first spots the three witches (who are seemingly Romulans?) who'll eventually prophesy his rise to the throne of Scotland.

Theatre review: Peanut Butter & Blueberries

The Kiln ends the summer, and Indhu Rubasingham's time at the helm, with a very gentle take on the romantic comedy format: Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan's debut play sees a pair of Pakistani-British students at SOAS (a London university specialising in Asian, African and Middle-Eastern studies) who bond over both feeling a long way from home: Hafsah (Humera Syed) is a strict Muslim from Bradford and doesn't believe in dating before marriage - although she also doesn't really believe in marriage anyway, having seen how most of them seem to work out. She initially (accurately) sums up Bilal (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain) as "the kind of Bilal who lets white people call him Billy," but his strong Pakistani-Brummie accent means she doesn't dismiss him completely: He too is more religious than he initially appears but with complicated feelings on relationships (his entire experience of Pakistani dads is that they leave their families, and he doesn't want to become part of that pattern.)

Theatre review: Police Cops in Space

In an otherwise very quiet August as all attention is back on Edinburgh, there was no way I was going to miss the return of the team from my Show of the Year 2023: After the success of Police Cops the Musical which has (so far) played two runs at Southwark Playhouse, the writer-performer team of Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe has gone back to their lo-fi roots: In what feels, given the late announcement, like it might have been plugging a scheduling gap at the Underbelly Festival, they've revived their 2017 show Police Cops in Space. This means just the original trio, minimal comedy props but actually quite a lot of comedy costumes - given Roe's almost complete inability to do the quick-changes without clattering onto the stage with his trousers halfway down his legs. This is not a complaint.

Theatre review: The School for Scandal

Continuing the new RSC artistic team's unpredictable approach to an opening season we have a rare main stage outing for Restoration Comedy, that genre made up of such a tangle of mini-plots it always defeats my attempts to provide anything like a coherent synopsis. But it's probably accurate enough to say the main focus of all the shenanigans in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal is a pair of brothers, young adults but still theoretically being kept an eye on by family friend Sir Peter Teazle (Geoffrey Streatfeild) since their father's death: Charles Surface (John Leader) is the party-animal youngest, who's already got through his share of the inheritance and has sold off half the contents of his house. But a lot of his financial mismanagement comes from his generosity to friends and strangers alike, and he's essentially kind-hearted - something his public image doesn't really reflect.

Theatre review: Slave Play

A play that had been causing a commotion in New York just before Covid caused a different kind, I'd been looking forward to Jeremy O. Harris' Slave Play, whose reputation for courting controversy with audacity preceded it. I don't know that it had done so to a wide enough audience to merit opening directly in the West End, but a bit of celebrity casting - and ensuring everyone knew the celebrity in question would be getting his parts out - must have made that seem like less of a gamble. While I try to avoid details about shows I haven't seen, I think the basic premise is pretty well known now - the fact that all the production photos come from the second act suggests the producers have given up on what's really going on in the first being a secret: We open on an antebellum plantation with slave Kaneisha (Olivia Washington) being brutalised by overseer Jim (Kit Harington.)

Theatre review: Hello Dolly!

Recently-upgraded Dame Imelda Staunton finally gets to take the title role in Jerry Herman (music & lyrics) and Michael Stewart's (book) Hello Dolly Exclamation Mark: Dominic Cooke's production is another holdover from 2020, delayed even further by the leading lady's prior commitment to try and elicit sympathy for the Queen having to give up her favourite yacht. In an unusually widow-heavy Broadway classic, Dolly Levi has dealt with the loss of her husband by throwing herself into matchmaking. But after several years she's decided she's finally ready to find a new match for herself - except the man she's decided on has already engaged her services to find him someone else. Scrooge-like Yonkers shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder (Andy Nyman) is the half-a-millionnaire she'd originally matched with New York milliner Irene Molloy (Jenna Russell.)

Theatre review: The Grapes of Wrath

It turns out The Grapes of Wrath isn't actually about haemorrhoids - John Steinbeck's Great American Novel^TM, in an adaptation by Frank Galati which Carrie Cracknell revives at the Lyttelton, wouldn't be dealing with anything as light-hearted as that. Instead this is a definitive story of the Great Depression, and the production opens with a dramatic, balletic series of scenes (movement direction by Ira Mandela Siobhan) showing the wind ravaging the people and the overfarmed land, creating the famous Dust Bowl which left farming families across America without an income. We follow the extended Joad family, led by the endlessly kind Ma (Cherry Jones) and terminally passive Pa (Greg Hicks,) as they drive to California where, according to flyers that have been distributed across the country, there are many good jobs to be found picking peaches and grapes.

Theatre review: After Sex

Siofra Dromgoole's After Sex follows a casual couple navigating whether and how to make their relationship something more concrete, entirely through the conversations they have after sex - it's not a conceit the playwright sticks to entirely religiously, but it does offer a slightly new way of looking at a frequently-covered subject. We meet Her (Antonia Salib) and Him (Azan Ahmed) just after the first time they had sex (and a little bit during the second,) having met at work and decided to try something no-strings-attached. It's a short play, but it would be even shorter if they didn't find that strings were attaching themselves pretty quickly whether they like it or not, and pretty soon they're both betraying the fact that part of them is already imagining a longer-term future together; usually when they're most enthusiastically trying to protest to the contrary.

Theatre review: Fangirls

Turns out July is the month of imported shows about 14-year-old girls kidnapping celebrities, as the Lyric Hammersmith hosts the UK premiere of Australian musical Fangirls. Yve Blake's (book, music and lyrics) show centres on fans of a fictional boyband star whose similarity to any real persons living or dead is, I'm sure, purely coincidental: Harry (Thomas Grant) auditioned for a British talent show that turned him down for being too young to compete solo, but instead put him in a manufactured boyband that went on to conquer the world (my lowkey favourite gag in the show was the band being called Heartbreak Nation, which is such an accurately half-hearted combination of two random words for a manufactured X Factor boyband.) Edna (Jasmine Elcock) is a Sydney teenager who spends hours on her computer reading and writing Harry fanfic.

Theatre review: The Hot Wing King

The Pulitzer drama prize continues to try and get me back on side, with its 2021 award going to a writer I've liked for a long time, Katori Hall. The Hot Wing King's take on the hot-button topic of masculinity, and particularly black masculinity, is a refreshingly different one as it centres the action around a found family of gay men: After five years in a long-distance relationship Cordell (Kadiff Kirwan) moved from St Louis to Memphis to be with boyfriend Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Rhoden,) leaving everything behind including a wife and two children. The play takes place over the weekend of the annual Hot Wing Contest, a cook-out Cordell has come close to winning but never quite achieved before, and as ever they're joined by their friends, the flamboyant Isom (Olisa Odele) and more reserved, sports-loving Big Charles (Jason Barnett,) to help them put together the recipes Cordell has perfected over the last year.

Theatre review: ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen)

In keeping with his usual theatrical style, originally developed when he was denied a passport and couldn't perform his shows himself, Nassim Soleimanpour uses a different actor as his proxy for every performance, allowing him to have someone make a connection with the audience even if he can't do so in person. Unusually, for his latest play ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) the full schedule of guest stars was revealed in advance, and given there's now a message on the website saying that no, you can't have a free ticket exchange to a different night, the Royal Court might be regretting that as, presumably, they're getting inundated with calls demanding they see Jodie Whittaker or Toby Jones. Tonight's guest National Treasure was Meera Syal, who at least would have had some idea what she was getting herself into as it transpires she's done one of Soleimanpour's previous shows: The playwright was excited as that had been the performance his wife caught, and she'd gushed about Syal's performance.

Theatre review: Red Speedo

Well I didn't have weaponising "You Got It" on my Bingo card of what theatres would try this year, but that's what Matthew Dunster's production of Red Speedo does, replaying the song on a constant loop before the show begins, before ramping up the volume to levels even an Orange Tree matinée audience should have been able to hear. At least it's better than those ten-second sound loops I've had at some shows, and it turns out Roy Orbison's song is such a banger I was still tapping my feet to it by the seventh or eighth repetition. On-topic lyrics aside, I was expecting a reference to this being a motivational aid the protagonist listened to before a race, but nothing so specific transpired to explain the choice. Holly Khan's sound design also goes in for a loud klaxon to mark the start and end of every scene, echoing the way Olympic swimming races are started, and giving the audience an occasional jolt.

Theatre review: The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare's Globe)

There's only really two things wrong with The Taming of the Shrew: One of them is half the plot, and the other is the other half. In Padua, the beautiful Bianca (Sophie Mercell) has many suitors, including the wealthy locals Gremio (Nigel Barrett) and Hortensio (Lizzie Hopley,) and recently-arrived Lucentio (Yasmin Taheri.) They compete for Bianca's hand in a needlessly convoluted scheme involving assuming fake identities, swapping around real identities, and a steadfast refusal to say a single funny line. The other storyline gives the play its title, as Bianca is not allowed to get married until her older sister Katherina (Thalissa Teixeira) does, and as she's considered a difficult woman, it seems she never will. So Hortensio recruits his mercenary friend Petruchio (Andrew Leung) to marry Katherina (it's not like she has any say in the matter) and once that's done he proceeds to bend her to his will through a sustained campaign of gaslighting and literal torture as defined by the UN.

Theatre review: Skeleton Crew

Michael Longhurst's run at the Donald and Margot Warehouse ends with something of a whimper, as the original play scheduled to close his tenure had to be cancelled - I think for contractual reasons - and instead director Matthew Xia was given Dominique Morisseau's Skeleton Crew. It's a play that does feel connected to the last few years at the venue, which have included two Lynn Nottage plays about the decline of American industry in the 2000s, but while the themes are similar Morisseau doesn't quite have the spark to her writing that elevates Nottage. Set in the break room of the last small car factory left in Detroit in 2008, the workforce have been pared back to a bare minimum but the four employees we meet are trying to convince themselves that the factory's closure in the next couple of years isn't as inevitable as it looks.

Theatre review: Alma Mater

Is it something that personally targets just me, or does the Almeida have a particularly unlucky track record of illness among its actors? I worked out that over the last eight years I've had to reschedule three shows there, miss one entirely, and have one performance meant to be a few weeks into the run turn into an early preview after the original star was replaced. The only comparable run of bad luck I can remember is when any RSC actor who went anywhere near a bicycle was guaranteed at least one fracture. Come to think of it that was around the time current Almeida boss Rupert Goold was at the RSC. Has Gooldilocks been a jinx all along? Making that third entry onto the list of rescheduled visits is Kendall Feaver's Alma Mater which had to replace original star Lia Williams with Justine Mitchell at short notice. Additionally, Nathalie Armin was indisposed today, so the supporting role of Leila had to be read in by Assistant Director Connie Trieves tonight.

Theatre review: Grud

After being developed at a Hampstead Theatre playwrighting scheme (back when Hampstead had development money,) Sarah Power's Grud now receives a distracting staging from Jaz Woodcock-Stewart in the Downstairs studio space. Bo (Catherine Ashdown) is a socially-uncomfortable science geek with no friends at her sixth-form college, until she meets the equally eccentric but more hyper Aicha (Kadiesha Belgrave,) the only other member of their school's space club. As they attempt to build a working miniature replica of a device that's about to be launched into space to do tests, the two girls do quickly feel affection for each other, but Aicha is a lot more enthusiastic about showing that she's excited to have made a friend on her level. Bo's mixture of not knowing how to behave around people, and not wanting to get too close to anyone, comes from growing up with her alcoholic single father.

Theatre review: Mean Girls

The audience at the Savoy Theatre were largely decked out in pink today. Security let them all in, but frankly they were lucky, considering it's not Wednesday. Tina Fey's (book) musical adaptation of her endlessly quotable 2004 film with Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics) finally makes it to the West End, and the new Mean Girls doesn't disappoint: Cady Heron (Charlie Burn) goes from being home-schooled by her mother in Kenya to being thrown into the deep end of an American High School. Her guides to the convoluted class hierarchy are queer outsiders Janis (Elena Skye) and Damian (understudy Freddie Clements) but the social group she ends up joining is the Plastics, when she catches the attention of their fearsome leader Regina George (Georgina Castle.) Cady's been warned about the school's ruthless alpha pack, but thinks she can study them from the inside by treating them as the lions she watched in Africa.

Theatre review: I'm Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire

Turning Misery into (more of) a black comedy, Samantha Hurley's New York hit I'm Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire transfers to Southwark Playhouse with its original director, designer and leading lady - the latter's performance being a big part of what sells... whatever it is that's going on here. Set in 2004, around the time that the internet started to be fast enough and ubiquitous enough to help blur the lines between fandom and stalking, Shelby Hinkley (Tessa Albertson) is the 14-year-old president of the Tobey Maguire fan club, whose regular video messages to members include an update on the actor's current whereabouts. It turns out she's got a specific plan for this information though, and when Tobey (Anders Hayward) gets anaesthetised to get his wisdom teeth removed, she's ready to grab him from an LA dentist's practice, stuff him in a duffle bag and onto a coach, and chain him up in her basement in South Dakota.

Theatre review: Your Lie In April

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: As all seats for Your Lie In April's preview period are being sold at the same price, I wasn't going to miss the chance to see a show in a West End theatre from a seat where the stage was actually visible, so I went before the official press night.

For the latest in the West End's unofficial East Asian season the Harold Pinter Theatre is decked out in the familiar cherry blossom so we know we're back in Japan: Your Lie In April is based on Naoshi Arakawa's popular teen romance manga, which makes it an interesting contrast to last week's Marie Curie, a Korean take on a European story that very much followed a Western musical template: Here a largely Western creative team takes on a Japanese storytelling tradition, and while Frank Wildhorn (music,) Carly Robyn Green and Tracy Miller (lyrics,) Riko Sakaguchi and Rinne B Groff (book) offer up another slice of Broadway-friendly music, Nick Winston and Jordan Murphy's production maintains a cartoonish feel that reminds us of its comic book origins with a distinctively Japanese flavour of cheese.