Tim Bano

The tried and sometimes true conveyor belt between Bath Theatre Royal to Theatre Royal Haymarket continues rumble on, bringing big old fashioned productions of big old fashioned plays with big name actors. Terence Rattigan’s maudlin masterpiece The Deep Blue Sea with Tamsin Greig as tragic heroine Hester Collyer follows in the wake of A View From the Bridge (Dominic West) and The Score (Brian Cox) and lands somewhere between the two.  It’s never much of a chore to see this play, one of the most well made of the well made plays, with its perfect substructure of unspoken feeling and roiling passion. But it’s also a play that summons a long history of brilliant performances. The most recent big one, the National Theatre production in 2016 with Helen McCrory, was pretty great.  As for this, it isn’t bad at all. Even though there’s nothing wrong with the direction by Lindsay Posner (who also did A View From the Bridge in a similarly perfectly good way) or the rundown set by Peter McKintosh, or the day-to-night lighting by Paul Pyant, not much particularly stands out either. It all does the job – all gets out of the way of the play, and maybe that’s the best thing. Let the play speak for itself.  Tamsin Greig takes on the role of Hester, former wife of a judge. She’s now shacked up with a young and sexy test pilot and has tried to kill herself when he forgets her birthday. Across the course of a long career in lighter and comic roles, Grieg has often brought unexpected depth and wa

This review is from the New Diorama in 2023. After the Act transfers to the Royal Court in expanded form in 2025. If you search Hansard, the transcript of everything ever said in Parliament, for ‘syphilis, gonorrhea and genital herpes’ there is only one result. It’s a furiously homophobic speech given by the Conservative MP Jill Knight in 1987 as she led the charge for a law that banned ‘the promotion of homosexuality in schools and local authorities’.  The members of Breach Theatre weren’t alive when Section 28 was passed in 1988 but the 15 years it was in force had a wounding legacy on the generations that grew up under its influence. Through verbatim testimony, Parliamentary transcripts, news reports and other materials from the time, these four performers tell the story of one of the most regressive, destructive and cruel pieces of legislation in this country’s recent history. Oh, and it’s a musical.Writer/director Billy Barrett and writer/performer Ellice Stevens have strong form when it comes to big themes and inventive use of verbatim: there was 2016’s ‘Tank’ about the CIA’s experiments with dolphins, and their 2018 masterpiece ‘It’s True, It’s True, It’s True’, which used the transcript of a seventeenth-century rape case to show up the woefully inadequate approach to rape convictions today. The company’s powers are undiminished with ‘After the Act’. It’s a bit messy, a bit imperfect, but its flaws are completely overwhelmed by all that’s good about the show. The song

New shoots keep growing from Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, its legend quietly bubbling away for 20 years and its strange, unsettling magnificence never wavering. First performed in 2005, it was a solid rejection of stuffy plays where the actors say their memorised words each night in the same way. Instead, every performance has a different actor performing alongside experimental theatremaker Crouch, now almost 400 of them, including Hugh Bonneville, Mike Myers and Alanis Morrissette. They come on stage, follow Crouch’s instructions, take on the part of a grieving father and generally look very nervous while doing it. The actor has never seen or read the play before, and the audience doesn’t know which star guest they’ll get. For this twentieth anniversary production, the list of actors eager to submit themselves to this grief-laden improv show is impressive: David Tennant and Indira Varma are on the roster, while on press night it was Jessie Buckley pulled up from the front row.The performer is instructed very precisely by Crouch what to do and say. She is Andy, a middle aged man, grieving the recent loss of his daughter who was killed by a driver. The driver was a stage hypnotist – Crouch flits between being authoritative man in charge of the show, and hapless entertainer in silver waistcoat and stumbling patter – and Andy attends one of his rubbish performances to find answers. At every moment, Crouch lets Buckley know what to do, either through a headpiece, a script in her han

  General advice is to stay away from hornets’ nests, especially if you are the West End and you want people to have a nice time and pay lots of money for a ticket. Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play goes against general advice. In fact he finds the biggest hornets’ nests he can and prods at all of them, and sees what comes flying out. What does come out is pretty spectacular. Despite recently winning what seemed like every single award that had ever been invented, and turning round the faltering fortunes of the Royal Court Theatre, there was never a guarantee that his play about (‘about’ seems like a fairly inadequate word) Roald Dahl’s antisemitism – and the deep trenches of dispute about Israel – would work in the West End. At the Royal Court you expect that kind of politics. The West End is for musicals and celebrities.But it does work, just as brilliantly. First off there’s John Lithgow (also all the awards) stooping and scowling his way into Dahl, charming in his grandpa-ish grumping at the beginning. He’s a walking metaphor: a giant – of literature, of stature – and big. But friendly? If you knew nothing about him except the good stuff – Charlie, Matilda, Mr Fox – you’d be charmed by his strong will, his passion and compassion. It’s 1983, he’s got a bad back, his house is being noisily renovated, he’s recently got engaged, and has a new book coming out so no wonder he’s grumpy. When his publisher suggests he moves temporarily to a nearby cottage, his crabby reply is, ‘I don’

Genre-bending Singaporean playwright Joel Tan throws a lot into the mix to make a play about whether we should return artefacts to China not dull, and quite a lot of the time he succeeds: his Royal Court debut is a playful, disjointed collection of scenes-cum-installations which enjoyably ignore convention, and definitely one of the more ambitious shows there’s been in the Royal Court Upstairs recently.   A mummified figure sits on a plinth at one end of the space, its form turned into twists and distortions by the layers of cloth and rope wrapped around it. This is Guanyin, a (fictional) sacred Chinese statue that was nicked by some Brit at some point and plonked in the British Museum. The Chinese government wants it back. Starting with a protest from some Islington witches, each subsequent scene plays out with new characters, hopping between people and places (doddery art historians, political prisoners, activist students, dodgy billionaires), building up the history of the statue and arguments that now blaze around it; the cultural and political stuff, the institutional context, the history of it, its artistic value, its spiritual significance, but also the personal encounters people have with the object.  The constant drop away of meaning and context between each scene is enjoyably disorienting: it takes a minute to work out if or how one sequence is connected to the last. Under directors emma + pj, some scenes are dance, tableaux, non-literal. Some are earnest, others pl

Following its acclaimed summer 2024 run at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Fiddler on the Roof transfers to the Barbican as park of a tour of the UK. There’s an irony that ‘Fiddler On the Roof’ is being revived in the only theatre in London that doesn’t have one. But Jordan Fein’s joyous, then suddenly very sad production is all about uprooting traditions. So for the opening image – one of the most famous in musical theatre – where the fiddler would normally fiddle on a shtetl rooftop, here instead in Tom Scutt’s superb design he stands among wheat sheafs on a strip of land uprooted and peeled back like skin to hang threateningly above the stage.It’s a remarkable image in a production full of them; a production about reinventing a classic musical through small gestures and symbols, rather than radical high concepts. Famously, ‘Fiddler’ was criticised when it premiered in 1964 as ‘shtetl kitsch’. We’ve got Tevye, the old wisecracker, and the increasingly untraditional marriages of his daughters; we’ve got the small Jewish community with the matchmaker and the slightly hapless Rabbi.But Fein, who co-directed ‘sexy Oklahoma!’ when it came to London last year and helped strip it of any hokey old associations, eradicates the kitsch here, too. Yes it’s funny – Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye still cracks jokes and talks to the audience, though he’s more dad-funny than the kind of showman-comedian that Tevye often becomes – and yes it’s faithful, but this is a serious production.Part o

When the IDF are going to attack, they drop a warning bomb: five minutes to get out and get away, as far as you can, before the big rockets come.  So says Gazan resident Mariam, in Khawla Ibraheem’s monologue. For such a terrifying concept, Ibraheem – who performs the monologue, too – starts things off breezily. She asks the stage manager if we’re good to start. Chats to us like we’re catching up on the phone, occasionally asks us questions (‘how many pairs of underwear would you pack?’) and gets frustrated when politely reticent audience members don’t answer.  Then she starts practising her escape: setting timers on her phone to mark five minutes, packing bags the same weight as her small son, worrying what she’d do with her mother, thundering down the seven floors of her apartment block. This becomes an obsession, as normal life around her is slowly obliterated and her mind, in a constant state of alertness, winds itself tighter and tighter. By the end Ibraheem’s voice – always loud and clarion-like – becomes high-pitched and breathless like a long scream.  The script was developed with Oliver Butler, who also directs, and in its chattiness there are some beautifully crafted lines: ‘our freedom is anything but ours’ Mariam says, resenting the many who claim stakes in her home. But the great strength of the writing is the way Ibraheem lets the boring things of everyday life mingle with the horror of being in a war zone. As she runs down the seven flights of stairs, Mariam n

How do you take two national treasures and make them really quite awful and annoying? Well, like this. Celia Imrie is Beth, the strong-willed, callous, possessive mother of Tamsin Greig’s meeker, milder Bo. After Beth has a stroke, slices of their lives together unfold repetitively in Anna Mackmin’s exploration of motherhood, which seems desperate to be unconventional but plays out with a plodding realism from the opening medical crisis to the inevitable end.  After an accomplished career as a director, Mackmin has added writing to the mix more recently, and she does both here. Maybe that explains the feeling of a production that’s always trying to do too much – from its washed out projections to an undercooked adoption subplot – often to too little effect. A hospital bed raised centre stage at the back (blue, clinical) bleeds into a cosy kitchen set at the front (earthenware, Aga), while Imrie and Greig shunt between the two spaces. Imrie gets to enjoyably scene-steal as Beth (always Beth, never ‘mum’, you see), with long dyed hair and a frankness about sex that revolts Bo. She’s the kind of person that you’d call bohemian if you actually believed in the Eddie-from-Ab-Fab broad brushstrokes of her character. Still, floating round in billowing robes she provides some nice comic moments. ‘I had a one night stand’, 22-year-old Bo reveals. ‘Finally!,’ Beth replies. ‘Did he have a nice cock?’ Much of the play she spends mutely in bed while completely unconvincing medical business

Following the Royal Court’s huge 2024 success Giant, here’s another play that suggests that under new artistic director David Byrne, the theatre is becoming a good place to see really smart, really sharp political work.This one is by South African writer Amy Jephta, and whirls brilliantly around a super simple idea: a smart new build cul-de-sac in a nice part of town in South Africa, where suddenly a shack pops up. Three couples who live on the road plot to get rid of the entity that’s dragging the value of their houses down, and Jephta whips up a lot of issues, mainly gentrification, race and class. But as directed by Nancy Medina it’s all done with such a huge sense of humour and a frenzied energy – not to mention the toe-curling awkwardness of some of the conversations – that it’s a constant joy to watch.We start in the very tasteful home of the only Black couple in the neighbourhood. Mimi M Khayisa plays snob Bonolo, who has a vintage cheese knife and a wine aerator, while at the same time insisting she is the defender of poor Black communities. Her husband Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) has managed to escape a poor childhood to end up in a high-paying financial job.They invite their next door neighbours, white couple Chris and Lynette, for drinks, and the conversation ripples with assumptions. ‘I’m in securities,’ Sihle says to Chris. ‘Which security company is that?’ says Chris. There’s a younger couple, too, Jess and Andrew, who have overstretched themselves to buy their hous

What happens if you give kids in conflict zones guns? That’s the thrust of this new play by Josh Azouz, whose work has often blended horror and humour, using strange and sometimes surreal settings to tune into the politics of race, religion and human relationships.His last play, Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia, explored Jewish-Arab relations via a knitting Nazi. This latest – a self-aware comedy first about keeping secrets as a teenager, then about keeping secrets as a soldier – has the same impulse, essentially an anti-war message through off-kilter comedy, but it’s less specific in its target.Gigi (Tanvi Virmani) and Dar (Lola Shalam) are two young soldiers guarding a roadblock, somewhere. The lighting suggests it’s hot and sandy. Current events make comparisons to the Middle East inevitable, though the lack of place names means you can map any conflict zone onto the bare stage. In this strange, non-specific landscape they talk – often directly to the audience, seemingly aware they’re in a play – about how they’re a few days from the end of compulsory service. They eat Nutella and chat about boyfriends, secrets (who’s sleeping with who), their different backgrounds (Gigi is rich, Dar is left-wing). They fiddle with their massive machine guns. Virmani and Shalam bring the goofy dialogue to life brilliantly, Shalam’s Dar the more garrulous and mercurial, while Virmani is quiet and intense.Despite the occasional mention of ‘enemies’, ‘extremists’, ‘your people’, thes

Waleed Akhtar’s last play ‘The P Word’ was a love story: two gay men from different worlds, exploring attitudes to sexuality, racism, asylum seekers. It was a huge hit and won an Olivier Award. His new play is a love story, too, but of a very different kind. Starting as a period piece in 2006, we hurtle through almost two decades of friendship between Zaid and Neelam. Zaid is gay, Neelam has ‘a reputation’ after sleeping with a classmate. Both come from fairly strict Pakistani Muslim families. They start off in sync: uni, clubbing, first loves. Then they start to weave in and out of each other’s paths. And then they diverge.  Akhtar writes their (initially) uncomplicated platonic love as brilliantly as he does their crackling arguments. it’s hard not to fall for Zaid, a sweet and optimistic Nathaniel Curtis, who adds a bitter note of self-interest as the play goes on, and Mariam Haque’s Neelam - a superb performance - who starts cynical and sarcastic, with flashes of beautiful sincerity, before modulating her accent and muting her brashness as she gets older and settles into a good job, starts a family.  Director Anthony Simpson-Pike has the duo flitter through the staccato scenes in a sunken circle, the many locations summoned with Christopher Nairne’s brilliantly busy lighting. With Zaid and Neelam wannabe playwrights, Akhtar chucks in plenty of in-jokes about the theatre world, its approach to programming Asian writers, and its demands on the content of their plays. But he

Of that persistent strand of plays about putting on plays, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ‘Our Country’s Good’ is among the best known, and among the best. Adapted in 1988 from Thomas Keneally’s novel ‘The Playmaker’, it follows the first British colonists landing in 1780s Australia. Some are convicts who’ve been transported, some are marines sent to supervise and civilise. One soldier has the bright idea of putting on a play; so they debate, they rehearse, they put on Farquhar’s Restoration satire ‘The Recruiting Officer’.  That sets up loads of opportunities for jokes about theatre, and smart lines about plays, and it’s that self-awareness that director Rachel O’Riordan leans into in her chunky, slightly exaggerated production. All the acting is overacting, the cast pushing towards a shouty, almost absurd register, with some scenes turning into broad comedy as they all entertainingly take on multiple roles. They seem to want to constantly remind us they are actors putting on a production of ‘Our Country’s Good’.  Gary McCann’s set brings it out too: an undulating dune with stripped trees – ‘a brittle burnt out country’, as one character says – natural looking until you hear the plastic thump of the actors’ feet on it, and see the spotlights come slowly down from the sky.  That smart concept and boisterous comedy too often come at the expense of the play’s seriousness of purpose. The more harrowing scenes have to work harder to earn their power. There’s an important strand in her