I'm one of those people whose summer is not complete without the Open Air Theatre's Dream.  Each year a talented director finds a new way of making use of this beautiful, almost magical, open air setting, and the Dream is a perfect play for this setting.

So this year, along comes a director, Atri Banerjee, who decides to build a huge brown ugly staircase structure, topped with ugly brown curtains, so constructed as entirely to hide the theatre's natural charm.

At first you think: when the action of the play moves to the forest, they will open those horrid brown curtains and we will at least be able to see the tops of the trees.

And they do open the brown curtains, to reveal a second wooden set, uglier than the first, with some badly painted trees on it, carefully constructed so as to hide all the real trees, and topped with a formica roof whose monumental ugliness makes the rest of the set look quite nice.

There is electric music, and characters are randomly dressed, some in modern clothing, some in Elizabethan, but most of them in unidentifiable frills of various sorts.

This is what they spent the extortionate £75 a seat they charged me on. Atri Banerjee has thrown every possible directorial gimmick at the thing, all at once. Good money has been spent in order to hide a perfect setting, and build a thoroughly nasty one.  It's a horrible evening in the theatre. Is a Dream in this wonderful setting now a thing of the past? I so hope not.



Investigative journalism is a dying trade because it’s time-consuming and expensive. 

Once upon a time, one or two newspapers had the will and money to allow investigative journalists to take as long as they needed, while producing no content at all for the paper. Increasingly, those publications that want to do it can’t afford to, and those that can afford to, don’t want to. 

Peter Jukes is one of the few investigative journalists left in Britain, and he is now turning his research into a play. He it was who revealed that the major Brexit donor Arron Banks met officials from the Russian Embassy several times before the EU referendum. He also founded Byline Times, an independent investigative publication. 

He experiences the frustration that is the lot of investigative journalists: that you can expose a scandal, but it continues. So he is seeking a new audience by turning his investigation about Russian influence operations on British and global politics into a play about information warfare. 

Jukes’s play Trojan Horses is still in development, and London Pub Theatres was invited to a rehearsed reading at The Cockpit theatre in Marylebone. Its basic message is well known to artificial intelligence experts, and is spelled out near the start of his new play: “When the product is free, you are the product.”

Which is why Russian and American tech barons set fair to rule the world. As Jukes says, they know more about you than your close friends after 50 likes. After 100 likes, they know more about you than you know yourself.

The research is remorseless, and what it uncovers is terrifying. Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel, Arron Banks, Vladimir Putin, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump are all part of the same powerful and malevolent ecosystem. But not enough people know it yet.

“I decided to rewrite the research as a stage play” Peter Jukes told London Pub Theatres. “I may also turn it into a radio play. It’s important to do it as a play to bring it all together.” A lot of the dialogue is taken from real life. The characters did actually say the things they say in the play.

As it stands, it’s not yet theatrical enough. It is research read by actors. Jukes recognises that, and the play is to go through several more rewrites. The finished product is worth looking out for.