Hampstead Theatre

US dramatist Sarah Ruhl’s intriguing play does what it says in the title: it’s based on a correspondence between Ruhl and a student of hers named Max, a prodigious young man whose childhood cancer returned some time into their friendship. Big name Blanche McIntyre makes her Hampstead Downstairs debut directing Sirine Saba as Sarah and Eric Sirakian as Max.

It’s been more than a decade since Dickie Beau broke through with his uniquely weird shows that involve him lip-syncing to archival recordings, while he embodies the voices with movement and props and fun stuff like that. But Showmanism, expanded from its first iteration which premiered in Bath in 2022, feels like a reckoning with the form and with himself.Beau cuts a sinewy, ethereal figure on a dotty set (stunning design by Justin Nardella) where an astronaut helmet, an orange tree in a bath and an iPod suspended in mid-air are just some of the disparate objects that make up his cabinet of curiosities. Lights and drapes and television sets surround him, and a ladder plunges into the floor and up into the ceiling, like he’s in a treehouse in space.On the surface, the show is a history of acting. That’s what he was commissioned to make anyway. And it starts out on brief: some classic ‘I’m stuck in a box’ miming, recordings about Ancient Greek theatre, interesting musings on audiences and actors from the likes of Ian McKellen and Fiona Shaw. Beau puts on costumes, strips down, embodies each voice in a different way.These scenes are really enjoyable. When it risks getting up its own arse with solemnity and loftiness, Beau shoves some absurd touch in there – a silly movement, a funny prop – and besides, what’s not to like about listening to a long theatrical anecdote from Ian McKellen while a mostly naked man cavorts in a cosmic treehouse? It’s just that there comes a point...