Tickets

Kit Harington: ‘I f**king hate snootiness in the theatre’ In the first ever West End outing for the late Sam Shepard’s 1980 classic, Kit Harington plays Austin, a screenwriter house-sitting for his mother while she’s away in Alaska. If you bought a ticket because he looked hot in ‘Game of Thrones’, you might be disappointed, because in ‘True West’ he’s kitted out like an ’80s porn mogul living in a suburban witness protection programme.  As Austin works doggedly away at the typewriter, pausing only to water his mother’s plants like a good boy, he’s interrupted by the arrival of Lee (Johnny Flynn). Despite being the ‘successful’ one of the family, Austin is bullied by his older, cowboy shirt-wearing brother, who derails Austin’s latest project and sells his own hee-hawing western flick to the producer instead. On paper, and to some extent on stage, Shepard’s premise is pretty fascinating. There’s a lot happening here with warring (and wounded) masculinities, particularly how Austin’s achievements in a metro elite career don’t prevent him being trounced by his loudmouth, swaggering sibling. And then there’s the storytelling aspect. Shepard’s fighting brothers have a mythical or biblical edge, a modern-day Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus. The stories they’re writing are, in turn, also fables. Lee’s ‘true west’ script is based on an invented idea of the good ol’ U.S. of A., one filled with cattle trucks, car chases and wife-stealing ranch hands. But Matthew Dunster’s product

I didn’t see Rhys Ifans in Matthew Warchus’s production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ last year and I’m glad. He’s always a bit self-consciously ‘Rhys Ifans’, and you absolutely definitely must not doubt the sincerity of this Scrooge if this big, open-hearted test of theatrical nerve is going to come off. If you reckon Dickens paints in broad emotional strokes, hold on to your (top) hat: Jack Thorne’s version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ makes ‘EastEnders’ look like Ibsen.Stephen Tompkinson’s Scrooge starts off physically and emotionally cumbersome. He’s a kind of lumbering Anti-Santa: an un-jolly old man who goes round depriving people of stuff. It’s an interesting take on the part: as the ghosts show him the errors of his grasping, wasted life, he’s all Northern bluster and defensiveness. Around him, there’s carol-singing, there’s clog-dancing, there’s handbell-ringing (and plenty of hand-wringing). It’s like the blinking Olympic Opening Ceremony or something. There are also several stunning pieces of visual theatre: Marley’s ghost dragging a huge, Lady Di-wedding dress train of clanking chains; Scrooge alone beside a coffin on a wheeled carriage containing his future corpse.It’s sort of impossible not to read it all as a Brexit parable: Scrooge is cut off from the whirl of life around him by greed and fear and regret, pursuing his path with blinkered self-delusion. ‘No exceptions!’ he cries when called to account for beggaring the first man to show him kindness. Rob Howell’s minimal se

Patsy Ferran is just astonishingly good in this welcome West End transfer of the Almeida Theatre’s acclaimed revival of Tennessee Williams’s ‘Summer and Smoke’. From when we encounter her, caught in darkness, convulsing uncontrollably in an unsparing spotlight, she effortlessly holds the stage.Ferran is Alma Winemiller, a minister’s daughter and singing teacher. As she cares for her mother, who has suffered a breakdown, and takes care of the family home, it’s clear she has become trapped by expectations and responsibilities. She’s nervy and on edge, prone to anxiety attacks.The play centres on Alma’s moth-like attraction to John Buchanan (Matthew Needham). He’s a resentful, angry man, a trainee doctor who tries to drown out his fears in booze and sex, while being drawn to Alma. Meanwhile, their small Mississippi town seethes in the summer months.The relationship between Alma and John is unbearable to watch at times. Still, Needham and Ferran exert a magnetic pull on our attention as they collide. Director Rebecca Frecknall strips it down to its painful essentials, rejecting the trend of some Williams revivals which have cast the women as neurotics and eroticised the malice of his men.Here, the characters are complicated and messy. A restless Needham slides into positions around the stage like stations en route to Alma’s seduction. He’s a darkening bruise of a boy, with charm and insecurity flicking into cruel, gaslighting behaviour. It’s a gripping, often ugly performance.Wha