Tim Bano

Remember that incredibly cool band from Scotland in the ’80s that changed music forever despite only playing a few gigs? No? Well that’s because they didn’t exist. This sort-of one-man play (a hit in Edinburgh in 2022) is adapted from David Keenan’s 2017 hallucinatory novel about an imagined Scottish post-punk band called Memorial Device. There’s a lead singer who can’t form memories and a bassist who likes to cover himself in blood, that kind of thing.Paul Higgins plays Ross Raymond, a fanzine editor-cum-journalist who was there for all of it, enthusiastically bringing the band to life with mannequins, a fancy dress box and a laptop. Higgins is great, one of those middle-aged music obsessives who's never quite let go of their youth, telling the story with a passionate intensity, like he can’t quite believe we don’t know more about Memorial Device. Mimicking the form of the novel, which consists of interviews with other people who were there, a projector screen plays talking heads who flesh out some of the story.The text, adapted and directed by Graham Eatough, brings that place and that era to life in a beautifully joyful, haunted way. There’s the attention to detail first and foremost: the carefully created memorabilia, genealogy maps of the various bands that coalesced and broke up to eventually get to Memorial Device (Occult Theocracy, Slave Demographics), and the snippets of music from Gavin Thomson and Stephen Pastel which suggest a kind of woozy psychedelic vibe.And Ea

In 1884 a group of countries (Britain included) came together to divvy up Africa between them. The Berlin Conference is the inspiration for this very sharp, very clever game-theatre show from the masters of the form, Coney.  Warning: you will have to talk to strangers, and you will have to do stuff. This isn’t a sitting in the dark kind of evening at the theatre. We all go into a big room and split ourselves into groups of seven, our little gangs sitting around a plywood table on which is a blank plywood floor plan. The table is strewn with little plywood props and pens and other things, a beautiful custom made board game designed by Chloe Mashiter and Jacob Wu.  A story starts to unfold with the help of some deliberately over the top acting. Our tables are our new communities. We’re asked to design a house logo, create a house knock, draw items that we’d like to include in our house. We’re encouraged to discuss and chat – and it’s really kind of awkward, coming to collective decisions with complete strangers about a space we’re meant to call our home. One of my group wants to put a shrine in our home, another wants his PlayStation.  As the games continue, we start to settle into it: bonds form, everyone relaxes a bit. And then it all starts to go wrong.  The fun of it, really, is not knowing what’s coming – so that’s about as much as I’ll give away but writer Rhianna Ilube, who was behind the brilliantly, bitingly satirical play ‘Samuel Takes A Break’ recently, has created w

Tyrell Williams’s debut ‘Red Pitch’ – transferring to the West End from the Bush with a million ‘best play’ awards in its wake – is so good that it might make you like football. It’ll certainly make you like the three boys who spend their days kicking ball on their south London estate’s concrete pitch, dreaming of playing for a big team, and gassing about the big things in a 16-year-old’s life (football). There’s lots to say about how the dialogue is like the game itself, lines set up and built on and passed to the next player, and how director Daniel Bailey brings a manager’s eye to the production, turning the actors into a tight, three-strong team, who move around each other like players on a pitch, all support and trust. But the point really is that it’s a brilliant bit of writing about gentrification, friendship, masculinity and aspiration, without ever being heavy-handed.As Omz, Bilal and Joey meet up on Red Pitch, holding onto the certainty of playground rules – last to touch the ball goes to get it etc – they charge towards a future that seems very uncertain. In the background is the regeneration of the estate: some families are moving but, some are staying with the hope that it’ll make ends better.For Francis Lovehall’s Omz the regeneration might mean the lift starts working again so his 81-year-old grandad doesn’t have to climb five flights of stairs. For Bilal (Kedar Williams-Stirling) and goalie Joey (Emeka Sesay) it’s a new start somewhere nicer, maybe with a gard

Anyone up for a hilarious comedy about slavery? Rhianna Ilube’s play is as outrageous as it sounds, set in Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Ghanaians were held before being loaded onto ships and sent across the Atlantic. It’s now a tourist destination, with a gift shop of course, where Samuel hosts hourly tours for diasporic visitors making a pilgrimage to the site for the Year of Return.  Ilube takes the premise and turns it into a see-sawing satire about atrocity tourism, where broad comedy – ‘We don’t like the word “slave” here,’ Samuel says cheerily, ‘We have received feedback that it’s not a word people like’ – lurches suddenly into deep meditations on the reality and the destructive legacy of colonialism.  At first it’s all short, clipped scenes, snapshots from the hourly tours as Fode Simbo’s uptight, history-obsessed Samuel deals with endlessly crass tourists, all played by the brilliantly multi-roleing Tori Allen-Martin and Stefan Asante-Boateng. Some of these visitors are desperate for a connection with their ancestors: Allen-Martin’s turn as an old British-Jamaican woman talking to her ancestors is particularly moving. ‘Thank you for getting through it,’ she says, ‘sorry I’m here’. Some have just come along for the Insta opportunities - there’s another excellent bit from Allen-Martin as a hideous influencer.  All these people are starting to drive Samuel a bit mad. Simbo gives a great performance, all starched and upright, cheerful to begin with but increa

We’re here to see the world’s oldest comedy: that’s what Aitor Basauri and Toby Park, the two remaining members of the physical comedy company Spymonkey, tell us in this adaptation of Aristophanes’s ‘The Frogs’ which is very clever, very silly, very self-aware but not always as funny as it promises to be.  Aristophanes’s 2,500-year-old comedy follows the pompous god of theatre Dionysus and his fall-guy slave Xanthias as they go down into the underworld to bring back Euripides, the greatest playwright of all time. It was full of nods to Greek theatre of the time, in-jokes and fart gags, and adaptor Carl Grose’s update captures that really well.  We’ve got straight-man Park as Dionysus and deadpan clown Basauri as Xanthias, but they’re also playing themselves as they talk us through the reasons for staging ‘The Frogs’. It’s a complicated conceit, but essentially we get a show which, at any one moment, is a version of ‘The Frogs’ that’s faithful to the original in spirit and plot, as well as a play about Spymonkey staging ‘The Frogs”, as well as a play about Spymonkey the company itself.  Once a troupe of four core members, Petra Massey ‘went off to Las Vegas’ and Stephan Kreiss died in 2021, leaving just Park and Basauri to figure out what the company is in its current form. The third cast member, Jacoba Williams, playing all the other parts, encourages them to embrace being a duo by turning to the world’s first double act, Dionysus and Xanthias.  In a lot of places it’s very f

  Here are two things that theatre can do really badly: plays about plays, and plays about the importance of plays. Somehow Sam Holcroft has managed to write a play-within-a-play-about-a-play-within-a-play-about-a-play that tackles the importance of theatre while being un-self-important and actually very funny, and also a structural marvel.  Originally at the Almeida, now transferring to the Trafalgar Theatre, it starts by telling us we’re at a wedding (spoiler: we’re not) and then tells us we’re in a play (spoiler: we are) and then keeps peeling back layers and pulling rugs until you start questioning who you actually and what your role is in all this.  We’re in a community hall – fittingly a proscenium arch within a proscenium arch in Max Jones’s brilliantly drab design – in an unspecified country, vaguely Balkan, post-Communisty, where there’s a ministry for culture which vets and censors new plays. Car mechanic Adem submits his work, a verbatim piece about his neighbours, who swear and drink and have sex. Although deputy culture minister Čelik can’t approve of the nasty bits, he sees something promising in Aden and takes him under his wing.  The big questions Holcroft examines are what plays should be about - inspiration, escapism, nice stuff like that - or should they be more of (yes) a mirror of the world we actually live in, which often isn’t very nice. Director Jeremy Herrin brings humour to the fore in this production, especially in the moments whenČelik, Adem and o

  There were indignant jabs from critics when Steven Moffat’s debut play hit the West End last year, transferring from Chichester. ‘Well it wouldn’t get a West End run if it wasn’t by the former Doctor Who showrunner and creator of Sherlock’ was the gist, and that’s probably true; it almost certainly wouldn’t get a second West End run if it didn’t have the likes of Moffat and his Sherlock colleague Mark Gatiss involved.But it’s a decently funny play with a great premise: awkwardly British couple Peter and Debbie meet a voluble American woman on a cruise. ‘You must look us up if you’re ever in town’ they say to each other, but Elsa Jean Krakowski follows through and turns up on their doorstep unannounced. It also turns out she might be a murderer.The only difference here in its second stint is a casting reshuffle: out go Amanda Abbington and the sublime Reece Shearsmith as Debbie and Peter, in come Sarah Alexander and Lee Mack in roles that could almost be made for them.Almost, because although they’ve got long teeth in sitcoms – Mack with about a thousand series of ‘Not Going Out’ and Alexander with a pedigree that stretches back to Moffat’s own sitcom roots when she starred in ‘Coupling’ – the weird thing about the play is that it’s not quite a sitcom. The setup is there, as is the living room set, and the high hit rate of gags. But this isn’t a half-hour jobbie. They’ve got to sustain it over two hours, with a script that has some saggy stretches.Frances Barber remains a s

How do you like your disgust? You could get it straight from the source by watching the Covid inquiry unfold slowly and shamelessly in real-time. Or you can get the same story of the pandemic and the ‘leaders’ who steered us through it in the form of a Restoration Comedy.  And why not? Making his debut as a playwright, pedigreed satirist Armando Iannucci takes us back to really old-school satire, in search of the only way to ridicule the ridiculous which is more ridiculous than the ridiculous themselves.  Spooling from a mock epic poem he wrote in 2021, and using some of the same lines, a five-strong cast recounts the bleak history of Boris Johnson’s premiership as if they are a troupe of seventeenth-century players.  Director Patrick Marber, Iannucci’s old colleague on The Day Today and Alan Partridge, keeps the acting troupe motif going throughout as they grab wigs and other props to transform minimally into the many roles they each play. Rishi Sunak is Richer Sooner, ‘half man half coin’, Raab becomes Dominant Wrath with boxing glove permanently attached to his hand, while Paul Chahidi is Orbis Rex himself, mop-haired, convinced he is a literal god. ‘It’s true, and that’s the truth’, says Orbis a propos of nothing.  The cast isn’t doing impressions of the real people, rather pushing everything – voice and movement – to absurd limits. Amalia Vitale does this especially brilliantly when she takes on the guise of Matt Hancock as a literally invertebrate pile of slime pretendi

When the beloved queer theatre space Above the Stag closed down last year, much of the sadness focused on the loss of the annual filth-fest that was its adult pantomime, written for the last decade or so by Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper. But like a fairy roused from the dead by the cheers of the audience, the panto is back under a new company (He's Behind You) in a new venue (Charing Cross Theatre) with a new story and all the old jokes.This year we’re in the lesser-known Baltic state of Slutvia where the evil and very gay Prince Camembert, desperate for the throne, puts a curse on his nephew Prince Areola (Arry for short, of course): if he ‘takes a prick’ before his twenty-first birthday he will die. Then it’s an unending litany of gags about, well, everything from rimming to the Royal Family. So thick and fast does the filth come that it seems to infect the mind. Even the costumes start looking like Georgia O’Keeffe paintings, pink and labial. And is the set a giant bum hole? That no-holes-barred approach – why bother with double entendres when singles get a laugh – is wrapped around what’s actually a very traditional pantomime, complete with ghost benches and songsheets, as well as a cast of winsome goodies and wicked baddies.Chris Lane’s scheming Camembert is a scowling delight, while former Stag stalwart Matthew Baldwin is as wonderful as ever as the dame, this year Queen Gertrude of Slutvia, his thick make-up and colourful outfits a contrast to his wonderfully camp in

Behind the scenes of ‘The Mongol Khan’ When a play is being staged with the express purpose of celebrating 60 years of diplomatic relations the odds on artistic quality aren’t stacked hugely in its favour. ‘The Mongol Khan’ is a theatrical spectacle from Mongolia – dance, music, seemingly infinite costumes, a 70-strong cast, some light puppetry and lots of fierce shouting – that clearly has serious money behind it. It is very impressive, but at the same time seems like it was made by someone whose only frame of reference was Olympic opening ceremonies and Disney films.It’s a lavish production of a play about a fictional Khan (ruler), written in 1998 by the late, nationally-renowned writer Lkhagvasuren Bavuu and directed by his friend Hero Baatar. The story is your standard tragedy plot: Achug Khan gives birth to two sons, one by his wife and one by his consort. Problem is, Khan hasn’t ’spilled his seed’ inside his wife for 20 years so whose is the baby? She’s been, well, practising her Mongolian throat technique with his top advisor Egereg. Egereg has the babies swapped so his own son will be brought up to be Khan.This derivative story, peppered with a few deaths, plays out very slowly. Every ponderous line in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s faux-grandiloquent translation (as Egereg prepares to kill his lover, he is stayed by ‘the memory of the hardened nipples I used to stroke’) is met with a thunderclap and extended dance sequences while pounding martial music provides a relentles

When are you going to get married? When are you going to have kids?? For single people at the sore end of their twenties or (gulp) even older these questions become increasingly frequent and increasingly unwelcome. Jessica Hagan’s new play takes these maddening pressures and squashes them into Ama, 29 and unmarried, desperate to have a baby before she’s 30. Hagan’s first play, ‘Queens of Sheba’, was something theatre hadn’t seen much of before: four Black women on stage, supporting each other, uplifting, confessing, and just existing in a space that has often marginalised them.  The company that made the show, Nouveau Riche, had a massive recent hit with ‘For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy’, a moving, surprising, joyful tapestry of Black masculinity that started life at the New Diorama Theatre.  So there’s a weight of expectation for this new collaboration between Hagan and Nouveau Riche. But where those two shows were inventive and unique, ‘Brenda’s Got a Baby’ is surprisingly staid, more an extended sitcom pitch than a play.  That’s carried through in the performances, too: big, broad, goofy. Under director Anastasia Osei-Kuffour the cast all brilliantly bring their characters to life: Jahmila Heath’s settled sister Jade, Edward Kagutuzi as her kind-hearted husband Skippy, and at the centre a wonderfully bouncy, gesturing turn from Anita-Joy Uwajeh as Ama, a magnetic performer.  But the material is chaotic. The characters do and say the m

The old jokes are the best. Richard Bean breaks no new ground with his story of a bickering old Yorkshire couple and their upwardly mobile children now having to deal with them, but there’s plenty of good gags and enough heart to enjoy him not doing so.    We’re in Flo and Jack’s home, chintz-heavy, with furniture that’s so dated it’s fashionable again. They’re in their nineties. No internet, endless cups of tea, relentless bickering. They’ve invited son Robert and daughter Tina to visit, both in their fifties, one a successful author and the other a business manager for a chain of private GPs.    It’s a familiar idea: the generational split between parents who’ve lived and worked in a particular place for their whole lives – here, Wetwang specifically, where Bean’s own parents lived briefly – and the generation of their kids who got educated, left and boomed.   But even if the tropes are familiar, it’s a good laugh. The gags are constant, the best coming from the loving/bitter exchanges between ex-cop Jack and Flo, 70 years married, played by stalwarts Alun Armstrong and Marion Bailey.    They bring to life Bean’s loving portrait of a couple – based partly on his parents – that’s like every fractious old long-married pair (bits of every sitcom old couple from the Garnetts to the Royles are in here) while also completely distinct. Bailey, a late cast replacement, is as excellent as always but she’s nowhere near 90 and sometimes gets caught up in trying to act old. Armstro