REVIEW: Closer To Heaven, Union Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Closer To Heaven by Jonathan Harvey and The Pet Shop Boys at the Union Theatre, London

What makes the musical stand-out is it unashamed gaiety, and I use that word in its modern sense. This is, as Nicholas De Jongh said when the piece premiered, “the first truly gay musical to be written and composed by Englishmen” to reach the West End. It is also essentially youthful, and quite uncompromising in dealing head on with the vagaries and traps of young adulthood: sex, drugs (use and sale), pop music, alcohol, predatory conduct, prostitution, love, survival, sexuality and, most compellingly, the family you create separate from the family into which you are born.

REVIEW: Abyss, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Abyss by Maria Milisavljevic at the Arcola Theatre

But in the end the tension between the daily count of the passage of time and the avoidance of narrative direction is too much to sustain and in the final sections we return to a more predictable expositional technique with a measure of relief. Moreover, the performances of the actors notably relax once the abstract, staccato almost hieratic formalism gives way to a more naturalistic presentation.

REVIEW: Light Shining In Buckinghamshire, Lyttleton Theatre ✭✭

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill at the National theatre

There is an acute fascination in watching the richly intense banquet give way, bit by bit, to the advances of the common folk, to see the lavish table become stripped bare, and then transform into a place for measured debate instead of entitled excess. The wonderful lighting from Bruno Poet only accentuates the lush transition, as does Mary Chadwick’s atmospheric music. The hint of the regally attired Charles and his retinue, like a gorgeously detailed ghost, hovers in the background – there, but not there.

REVIEW: Ah Wilderness!, Young Vic, ✭✭✭✭

George MacKay and Dominic Rowan in Ah Wilderness at the Young Vic Theatre in London

Ah, Wilderness! Young Vic 4 stars In his 1932 play Ah, Wilderness, Eugene O’Neill returns to familiar themes such as family life, alcoholism and thwarted idealism but it stands out among his work for having a lightness of touch and event moments of comedy. Set in Connecticut on July 4 in 1906, it is a nostalgic family drama that is said to be O’Neill’s reinvention of his own less than happy childhood brought up by a distant, drug-addicted mother. In Ah, Wilderness!, the central character of 17-year-old Richard Miller is roughly the same age that young Eugene would have been in 1906. But, instead of a dysfunctional family, there is a sweet, loving mother and a father who is stern but a big softy underneath, both proud of their poetry-loving son. The play’s charm is beautifully captured in a new, trimmed-down production directed by Natalie Abrahami at the Young Vic. … Read more

REVIEW: Dead Royal, Ovalhouse ✭✭✭✭

Dead Royal at the Oval House Theatre

Roberts is immaculate in playing both parts: the sour, rotten, old Wallis who, despite her bitterness, wants to save Diana from the dreary drudgery of joining the monarchy; the shy, uncertain Diana, a mere child when it comes to the machinations of royalty, taking her cues from the gay coterie that surrounds her at the Palace and dimly thinking that a string of pearls might make her wedding a real event to remember.

REVIEW: Shock Treatment, Kings Head Theatre ✭✭✭

Richard O'Brien's Shock Treatment at the King's Head Theatre

Julie Atherton can play dowdy geek character, svelte seductive siren, and camp fetish magnet (complete with vinyl Nurse’s outfit just covering her pert derrière and barely containing her heaving bosom) seamlessly, as part of the one character. Atherton’s performance encapsulates the underlying promise of the piece: Geeks and Outsiders can have sex, drugs and Rock’n’Roll too! So too do the two other magnetic, but polar opposite, performances of totally committed seductive power. Ben Kerr is hilariously straight as Brad, the quiet, slightly dull husband of Janet with the body of a Greek God and Mateo Oxley milks every comic nanosecond in his turn as the outrageously camp, one-foot-leaping-out-of-the-closet Ralph Hapschatt.

REVIEW: Death Of A Salesman, Royal Shakespeare Theatre ✭✭✭

Death Of A Salesman by Arthur Miller at the Royal Shakespeare Company

The role of Willy Loman is very exacting, requiring great range and subtlety from the actor. The single greatest requirement, though, is for the actor to be Loman rather than to play him; there needs to be total immersion in the character, and the character’s different stages. It must be possible to see the Loman who so enthralled and impressed his sons, the Loman who believed in the Dream and to contrast that against the Loman who is engulfed, diminished, destroyed. Antony Sher gives a prickly, vigorous, erratically explosive performance. He might wear Loman’s skin but he never gets under it.