Reviews

‘smart, classy thriller which is eminently watchable’ ★★★★ A London police station, late at night. ‘A vulnerable woman with a disability is brought in.’ This telling line from the advertising blurb for the premiere of Athena Stevens thriller, immediately establishes a threat. It sets the woman apart for special treatment but is that going to be appropriate or not? Set in an interview room, the woman, played by Stevens herself, has been brought in for assault. As a woman with a disability, therefore ‘vulnerable’, there are rules which specify that she must be videoed, and a supervision panel must be present (albeit behind a glass wall, she knows that they are there). Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it? Yet the character, has caused the commotion because she’s seen a crime. Furthermore, she has also been reporting a suspicion of an impending disaster. The officers are not listening to her, and she’s understandably frustrated at being ignored. Is she crazy or is she justifiably outraged? The surveillance is set up nicely. As audiences enter into the interview room, they see themselves projected on the back wall with a camera on a tripod below. Once the play begins the video refocuses to show the woman being interviewed and the audience become the panel. Whilst we are probably unaware of that idea, it is an expression of just how clever this play really is. DCI Michael Turvy is played by Ché Walker to perfection, professional, polite and firm. Walker is also the director and whereas that dual role is often a risk, nothing is lost in this taut production. It’s smart, classy and has a certain charm thanks to actor Athena Stevens who is eminently watchable. As an actress with a disability, Stevens, is perfect to take centre stage of her own writing. This feels very personal and completely authentic. She annunciates the most important information with precision, but nevertheless audiences must take the trouble to lean in to catch every word. It doesn’t matter if anything is missed because the blanks are filled in as the show progresses making it edge of the seat stuff for those of us who like to use our brains. It’s all enhanced by brilliant videography (Lev Govorovsky and Rio Redwood-Sawyerr), sound (Julian Starr) and lighting (Mark Dymock). The visuals are so beautiful. And as for that title ‘Diagnosis’, there does seem to be one repeated a few times in voice over (part of the overall sound giving it an ethereal quality) which suggests that it is what brought our protagonist to be in this position of ‘vulnerability’ and is perhaps a reminder to us all that ‘there but for the grace of God’ … but this particular soul reaches out to help other people with passion and determination, a lesson to us all. The show is over very quickly running at just under 60 minutes (on the night I was there). It’s a little nugget of gold. DIAGNOSIS by Athena Stevens at Finborough Theatre 13 May – 7 June 2025 BOX OFFICE https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/diagnosis/ Director Ché Walker Videography Lev Govoravski Rio Redwood-Sawyerr Designer Juliette Demoulin Lighting Designer Mark Dymock Composer and Sound Designer Julian Starr Associate Director Jillian Feuerstein Producer Presented by Sarah Lawrie for Aegis Productions in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre. Cast Athena Stevens Ché Walker Ted Walliker

'A deliciously, dark delight' ★★★★★ The Sociable Plover is a rare British bird, now critically endangered, and part of the lapwing family. It’s the last British bird, Roy Tunt, an enthusiastic twitcher wants to tick off his list. As he tidies up in his birdwatcher’s den – Tanglewood One – deep in Suffolk and a storm crackles outside, a dishevelled stranger stumbles in. This uninvited working-class geezer in a suit and no tie, is as much of a lout as Tunt is a toff and a funny, random, awkward conversation ensues spanning bird life, relationships, the meaning of freedom, power tools and picnic food. But who is this stranger who calls himself ‘Dave?’ What is he doing here and why are the police currently combing the marshes for a white male? The Sociable Plover, currently marking a twenty-year anniversary, is a deliciously dark delight of a play. It originally had its debut at the Old Red Lion in 2005 and was also adapted into a movie, The Hide, which won writer, Tim Whitnall, Best Script from the Writers Guild of Great Britain in 2010. It’s straight from the mould of one of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, or more recently, the kind of subversive drama you would expect from Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s Inside No 9. With two superb performances, pacey direction from Christa Harris and a belting storyline, The Sociable Plover is pure joy from start to finish Jack Robertson (Artistic Director of the Old Red Lion) plays oddball, Tunt who still speaks to his wife in a picture frame, has a penchant for order and taste for chicken paste sandwiches. His sparring partner, Coronation Street’s Calum Lil, is a brooding, unpredictable, secretive presence. One character is slightly camp, the other seethes testosterone and the atmosphere between this bizarre Pinteresque pairing, which moves from curious to suspicious, fearful, and moving means that seventy-five-minute fly by. No pun intended. From the collective nouns of birds “a parliament of owls...a deceit of lapwings” to the lyrical names of various species including their Latin names, there is a deep love of language embedded in this script. But holding together the witty dialogue, sequence of red herrings and tantalising reveals, is a terrific thriller that unfurls gradually as the story builds. Sound and lighting by Benedict Escale and the all-encompassing set work together to immerse the audience in this enclosed, slightly claustrophobic world where outside birds fly freely and helicopters circle. Reversals, double reversals, and a powerful, dramatic ending could not be more satisfying and show that great drama only gets better with age. Catch this rare sighting before it vanishes from these shores. Photography: Alberto Roa THE SOCIABLE PLOVER by Tim Whitnall Old Red Lion Theatre Islington 13 - 24 May 2025 BOX OFFICE https://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/the-sociable-plover.html

'lingers in the mind ... invites contemplation, prompting questions about choice, chance, and the delicate threads that shape our lives' ★★★ ½ Nick Payne’s CONSTELLATIONS is a love story told through a prism of possibility. In this compact two-hander, cosmology and quantum theory meet the messiness of modern romance, as Marianne and Roland’s relationship unfolds across multiple parallel universes. Over the course of 70 minutes, we watch them meet, flirt, fall in and out of love, betray and lose each other - again and again, with only the subtlest of shifts altering their paths. Director George Derry leans into the play’s intellectual ambition with a simple black box set. Hanging mirrors and hooks evoke infinite realities - reflections and repetitions reinforcing the show's central concept, while scene changes are marked only by clean lighting shifts, helping the audience track the multiverse resets. The strength of the production lies in its restraint. With such a bold and cerebral structure, the temptation might be to overdo it. Instead, the staging allows the text and performances to speak for themselves. Freddy Williams brings warmth and sincerity to Roland, grounding the character in every universe, and his performance is particularly strong in the play’s more vulnerable moments. Costanza Pucci Di Montaltino’s performance as Marianne is uneven. She delivers the play’s lighter moments with confidence and good comedic timing, but her emotional beats are inconsistent, leaving Marianne feeling less fleshed out. Though the actors deftly and admirably navigate the technical challenge of delivering near-identical lines with new inflections and intentions, the structure's repetition risks emotional dilution. The brilliance of Payne’s script lies in how form mirrors content - just as Marianne explains the multiverse theory, we see its lived emotional resonance: one small moment can shift everything. The fragility and randomness of love and life are laid bare in every alternate version. This production isn’t one that will sweep you away with spectacle or grand emotion, but it lingers in the mind. It invites contemplation, prompting questions about choice, chance, and the delicate threads that shape our lives. Thoughtful and precise, it’s a quietly ambitious staging that honours the play’s intelligence - even if it doesn’t always land with full emotional force. Box Office: https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/constellations/#toggle-id-1 Photo credit: Samuel Daltry.

‘There’s potential for something really interesting and fantastical’ ★★ Bringing a Gen Z twist to a classic fairytale, Mermaids Have No Tears takes Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and uses it as a lens to understand the world in 2025. Meeting at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, new-in-town environmental activist Fyn (Everleigh Brenner) begins a relationship with an idealistic, aspiring professional mermaid, Morgan (Olivia Van Opel), a young woman so committed to her ambition that she’s convinced herself she’s a real one and pretty much lives in a bathtub. This tongue-in-cheek, is-she-isn’t-she claim adds an intriguing element of magical realism to the piece, which stands it out from the crowd and does add a believable touch of magic from the off. Over the course of a year, while Fyn explores their gender and Morgan opens up their relationship, into the mix comes Fyn’s friend, Wade (Jack Flammiger). He, while sleeping with Morgan, is secretly in love with Fyn. It’s a nice setup that quickly becomes bogged down by a series of socio-political issues and sometimes incongruous detours into Andersen’s life as told by Wade. The coupling of environmentalism with the fairytale, however, is fascinating, bang on trend, and clever. It is an accessible and deeply poignant way of making a point about our precious planet, without ever coming across as preachy. There’s something wonderfully, politically cynical, culturally satirical, and heartbreakingly moving in Morgan’s response to Fyn’s observation that her tail can’t be real as it’s polyester, by remarking that her species is reclaiming plastic pollution. The subject of gender though, while some interesting parallels can be drawn, feels more shoehorned in for topical relevance than a real and genuine exploration of the matter. It doesn’t mean or add anything, especially as it’s nobody’s story in particular. There’s Fyn’s journey of gender self-discovery; there’s Wade’s bisexuality, unrequited love and polyamorous epiphany (“should we be a throuple?!”); there’s Morgan’s slow acceptance of maturity, reality, and adulthood. There’s…basically too much. And this queerification of absolutely everything makes for cluttered and unfocused storytelling. That’s not helped by the fact that, ironically, they’re actually great performances, which means the characters seem to jostle unintentionally for position as the protagonist and the audience can’t develop any connection to them. At times then, it comes across like an underdeveloped play and an overdeveloped stand-up routine, as Wade’s smart, witty, and wacky monologues (albeit slightly random in the context of the story) throughout the show provide the real star quality here, meaning the actual action, the duologues, feel like plotless padding. Really, Flamminger kind of makes the piece, with his full-throated, though inconsistently characterised, performance as Wade, a literature lecturer, whose eccentric lessons punctuate the show. His hilariously camp portrayals of Hans Christian Andersen in various skits about the legendary writer’s own sexuality and unrequited love are fun and modestly disguise their own intelligence. In this way, Ellis Stump is clearly a great writer, and the 85-minute runtime is well-sustained, even without much of a driving force to speak of. The pace, structure, and actual words are good, with a natural professionalism. The jokes are funny, though sometimes drowned out by double-speed, and the waves of maritime puns are excellent. Julia Sopher’s direction is creative and thoughtful, if a bit frantic, and the set and costumes of recycled materials are richly considered. Overall, I think there’s potential for something really interesting and fantastical in this play. For me, though, it’s a bit thematically confused. With this amount of weight, it was either going to sink or swim, and at the moment I think it might be closer to the former. Or it’s at least treading water. All that said though, there is something here. These are interesting seas. In the grand scheme of things, this mermaid’s got legs. MERMAID HAVE NO TEARS by Ellis Stump Directed by Julia Sopher Barons Court Theatre, 29 April – 17 May 2025 Box Office: https://www.baronscourttheatre.com/mermaids Reviewed by Alix Owen

‘Accomplished revival’ ★★★★ Rattigan’s 1952 play is set a year earlier and has been revived many times. In this production the peeling wallpaper and shabby furniture (set by Peter McKintosh) plunges us immediately into 1950s austerity in an unfashionable part of London. Hester (Tamsin Grieg, reprising her role from the production at Theatre Royal, Bath last year) is deeply troubled. She has left the wealthy husband, now a judge (Nicholas Farrell) whom she can’t love for a younger, out-of-work former RAF pilot (Hadley Fraser) who is unreliable and unhappy. Thus she finds herself between the devil and the titular deep blue sea. The play’s famous opening presents Hester lying in front of the gas fire having attempted to take her own life before she is discovered by neighbours and the landlady. Grieg finds all the dazed anxiety that her character needs, sometimes smiling superficially to cover her turmoil and when she screams and shouts it’s almost physically painful to listen to. Her emotional range is very impressive. There is also an outstanding performance from Finbar Lynch as the tight-lipped, struck off doctor who helps Hester. He is so ungiving - until the very end of the play – that he’s hilarious. We are left wondering what he did to be jailed because he is clearly medically very competent. Rattigan’s original draft hinted at homosexuality but the play, as we now know it, leaves us to speculate. Farrell, as you’d expect, brings dignified angst to the ever reasonable Collyer, and Fraser excels as the hard drinking, rather tragic figure yearning for the unobtainable and unable to make Hester happy. There’s also a fine, nicely observed performance from Selina Cadell as the garrulous, nosey but well-meaning landlady. It is however, the quality of the direction which really makes this production fly. Lindsay Posner knows, really knows, what he’s doing and the pregnant pauses are masterly as, repeatedly, one character says something and everyone else simply looks stunned, delighted, horrified, outraged or whatever as it sinks in before anyone else speaks. This often creates rueful, very effective, comedy which is not something one necessarily associates with this play. But it works perfectly. It’s quite a treat to see theatre as accomplished as this. THE DEEP BLUE SEA by Terence Rattigan Directed by Lindsay Posner Theatre Royal Haymarket from Wednesday 7 May – Saturday 21 June 2025 Box Office www.trh.co.uk CAST Tamsin Greig as Hester Collyer Hadley Fraser as Freddie Finbar Lynch as Miller Nicolas Farrell as Sir William Collyer Selina Cadell as Mrs Elton Preston Nyman as Philip Welch Lisa Ambalavanar as Ann Welch Marc Elliott as Jackie Jackson Photography: MANUEL HARLAN

‘lurches into the surreal, and quite literally loses the plot’ ★ ½ For something that is billed as a comedy there are very few laughs in this play. I saw it on opening night. Leonard (Kieran Slade) is a nervous, geeky film buff who’d quite like promotion at work. In this he is encouraged by his friend/work colleague, Jasmine (Isabella Inchbald). The boss’s daughter Elyse (Rosina Aichner) is reasonably friendly while colleague Bradley (Adam Fitzgerald who wrote the play) is a brash Australian employee shoving a spanner in the works. Then it all lurches into the surreal, and quite literally loses the plot, when Leonard goes home and the actor Martin McConaughey (Adam Fitzgerald doubling) leaps out of a VHS tape and announces he’s a genie. Hmm. What on earth this tortuous play is meant to be about is a mystery. Is it a homage to Matthew McConaughey ? There are a lot of cultish references to his films but if you’re not familiar with them then that falls flat. Is it about the relationship between parents and children? Aichner doubles quite effectively as Leonard’s well meaning but irritating mother and Inchbald is strong as Elyse’s humourless, tyrannical German mother who owns the company the others work for although it’s very much a stereotype. Or maybe it’s about building self-esteem and “finding your identity” - a pretty clichéd cop-out if so. It’s a pity because a lot of work has clearly gone into this production. Moreover the cast are doing their best with a flawed muddle of a play. Inchbald in particular finds plenty of nuance in the long suffering Jasmine and Slade manages the contrast between Leonard and his all-American alter ego Leo (inspired by McConaughey) reasonably well. Alright, Alright, Alright runs 80 minutes without interval and it gives me no pleasure at all to report that it feels a lot longer. Alright, Alright, Alright by Adam Fitzgerald at Bridge House Theatre 13 – 24 May Directed by Neta Gracewell Box Office https://thebridgehousetheatre.co.uk/shows/alright-alright-alright/

‘A writer and a company to watch’ ★★★★ Actors spend their professional lives pretending, wearing clothes that aren’t theirs, saying words they don’t mean, feeling emotions that are someone else’s. And the premise of Pretend, a sharp, funny and whirlwind, look backstage during the run of a show is that they may spend the rest of their lives dodging or hiding from reality, too. Four characters living their best lives – a six-week run of a successful play after, at least for two or three of them, months of slogging through auditions without much work. We’re backstage in a set of dressing tables and imaginary mirrors, usually as the quartet remove make-up at the end of a show (some triumphs, some those nights when it hasn’t quite gone so well), and rapid-fire short scenes take us through the six weeks of the run, illuminating the lives of the four actors. The writing’s pin-sharp, capturing well the vibe that comes from making a show – the intensity and closeness of relationships, even friendships, that proximity and teamwork will require for the play’s run among people who may never work, or even meet again, once it’s over. Sophy’s the star, slightly apart from the others both in leading the show and in reserving the crises of her life rather than sharing them until she has to – the break-up with the man (a man also setting her apart), the break-up sex, the pregnancy and abortion that follow. Cat and Milly are in a relationship, but it’s more fragile than Cat knows, since Milly’s also seeing Emma, and since Cat sees Milly as a privileged nepo-child and Milly thinks Cat’s colour has helped her be the most consistently employed of them all. Emma, meanwhile, has to hide from Cat her affair with Milly, even as Cat shows her the wedding ring she’s planning to spring on closing night. It's Emma who gets the speech paraphrased in the opening para of this review, and it’s one of many quotable sets of lines from Jess Kambitsis’ superb script, a work, it’s surprising to find, is from a debut writer. The ending’s over-melodramatic, and taking it offstage seems an odd dramatic choice, but otherwise the play’s short running time packs far more than might be expected into scenes, that less well written might seem to skate over surfaces. The performances are strong (a great ensemble performance), although the rapidity of delivery means some lines are covered or lost way upstage. An opening night 39 minutes against an advertised 60 also felt like something may have gone missing (who did have Milly’s ear-rings, did they enjoy the much-discussed dauphinoise potatoes?), and even if it didn’t there’s room to expand this further and breathe a little more between revelations. In all, though, a substantial achievement in creating in such a short space four very real and distinct lives and making us care deeply about them. A writer and a company to watch. PRETEND by Jess Kambitsis at Lion and Unicorn Theatre 13 – 17 May 2025 Directed by Lucinda Freeburn Presented by Dawn Train Theatre Box Office: https://www.thelionandunicorntheatre.com/whats-on Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.

‘Joyful’ My now wife and I saw Shopping & F*cking in 1996 and it blew our minds. Shocking, visceral but very ‘real’ - it was like nothing I’d ever seen on stage before (in fairness aged 24 I hadn’t seen very much at that point). Whilst Mark Ravenhill has written many plays in the intervening years that show remains one of the greatest. And so, a mere 29 years later, I found myself outside the very lovely Wilton’s Music Hall and the great man is standing outside (we say Hello but I’m genuinely starstruck to say anything beyond that) ahead of 2 days of readings of 10 new plays. Based on scenarios and stories first published by Flaminio Scala and inspired by commedia dell’arte scenarios in Italy in 1611, Run At It Laughing is a cycle of 10 plays each of around 90 minutes, and being presented as part of the industry workshop platform Run At It Shouting’s professional actor development programme. All very admirable and, furthermore, all proceeds from the shows benefit www.niaendingviolence.org.uk/ a project which runs services for women and girls who have been subject to sexual and domestic violence. I’m in situ for the first play - Run At It Horny - which Ravenhill himself introduces and apologise for incoming rudeness and bawdiness. Sounds good. 10 actors sit in a line and with a guitar flourish we are off and running. Now, the cynic in me finds that sometimes these ‘different ways of presenting theatre’ can be just too gimmicky and a bit of a letdown. For every Gatz (Elevator Repair Service) there is a, well, fill in your own blank. Here, thankfully, we are in safe hands. Pre-dating Shakespeare but with more than a whiff of many of his themes and traits, the first tale is suitably bawdy to the point of being pantomime-esque with lashings of mistaken identities, cross dressing and a man who, frankly, can’t get it up. It took a while to get the story straight as, with only scripts in hand, the actors had to work hard to convey names and relationships to give the play focus and direction (this of course is more my problem than anything else). But this was joyful - a tad too long maybe - but with limited rehearsal time it was inspiring to see the group work so well together. It’s a tad unfair to pick out favourites but as Spavento, Omar Aga gave it some real oomph as did Fiona Spreadborough who was great fun as Franeschina as she tried too get Burratino - Kasper Faulkner, very good - to fulfil his husbandly duty……. Continuing on Saturday 10th May with 5 more plays (all ‘Run At It…’) there is much joy to be found here as the human condition is held up for gentle ridicule but with bawdy seaside postcard humour that is most welcome. Good stuff. Photos by Bec Austin

 Mark Ravenhill, one of the most distinguished of contemporary British playwrights, found some scenarios written in 1611 for plays performed in Italy, and used them to create ten new 90-minute comedies under the umbrella title ‘Run At It Laughing’. These were performed script-in-hand as rehearsed readings directed by Ravenhill himself at Wiltons Music Hall, on 9 and 10 May. To judge from the one I saw, the result was a series of laugh-out-loud funny and cringingly rude Jacobean romps. The humour is obtained, as often as not, from double entendres that would have made Kenneth Williams blush, and the failure of elderly male characters to recognise that what is under discussion is sex. The one I saw was called ‘Run At It Babies’. Two young women enjoy energetic affairs at a summer house party, as a result of which both of them swell alarmingly over the next nine months, and their worried fathers seek medical advice. Both the young women would like to marry the young men who helped them enjoy the summer, and the young men want to marry them. Unfortunately, this being fifteenth century Rome, to own up to having impregnated a young women outside matrimony will give her father the right to have you imprisoned and take all your goods and fortune. What can the young people do to secure their future happiness? I am not spoiling it for you, should you ever get the chance to see it, if I tell you that the answer involves people pretending to be spirits, and that there is a happy ending. Along the way, you will be asked to believe that doctors of the time, having asked for a urine sample to check if a woman is pregnant, could be fobbed off with cat’s piss, and were likely to prescribe medicine that would make whoever took it bark and yearn for her cosy kennel. The 11-strong cast sit in a row in the stage, scripts in hand, but they are clearly rehearsed, and all of them are ready with the right intonations and bits of business. All were good; standouts for me were Kathryn Pridgeon, Duncan Hess and Sasha Brooks. The actors all worked without a fee, and profits are going to the Nia Project, which runs services for women and girls who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse. Photos by Bec Austin