Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we were anywhere other than submerged beneath the fag end of the post-war years of austerity, the clothes confirm it. And a thought surfaces and will jab throughout the two hours runtime: “How different are things today in, say, Clacton?”But Ultz’s design work has grounded Harold Pinter’s second play firmly in pre-Beatles England, where even Elvis Read more ...

At one point, in John Fowles’s 1977 novel The Magus, the guru character in the story compares sexuality before and after the 1960s. He says that although “young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not”, there is also a loss – “a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion”.Sexual restraint has its own tender feelings. It is this emotional landscape that lies at the heart of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s debut play, Peanut Butter & Blueberries, at the Kiln Theatre. It’s a contemporary Muslim love story in which the two lovers never even touch each other.Set in Read more ...

Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness and the superlative acting they entail. These are monologues, a genre where dramatic excellence is primed to go right off the scale: think the powerful solos of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, the haunted storytellers of Conor McPherson’s plays, Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall. Recast after their runs at the Dorfman, the trio of plays is directed by Clint Read more ...

Adam Riches: Jimmy, Summerhall ★★★Adam Riches has long been famed as a performer who throws himself into his physical comedy – so much so that during the Fringe run of a previous comedy show he broke his leg. And now, with this one-man play he is on stage in tennis whites, running around and slamming down imaginary balls to a percussive soundtrack as he tells the story of Jimmy Connors, the self-proclaimed world's greatest tennis player.It's a fascinating story that even some keen tennis fans might not know. Connors retired at the age of 43, playing on well past his best days. But during Read more ...

The Sound Inside, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★ Adam Rapp’s unapologetically intricate, bookish two-hander arrives for its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre following a successful run in New York, including no fewer than six Tony nominations. It’s not a new work, then, but its themes and its gloriously, unashamedly erudite writing make it one of the strongest offerings in the Traverse’s Fringe programme.Not for nothing do literary references ricochet back and forth across Rapp’s Ivy League thriller-cum-love story. Bella Baird is a Yale professor of creative writing, and she discovers a Read more ...

In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically Read more ...

It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel on his experiences in 1936 of reporting for a San Francisco newspaper on the US migrant camps known as Hoovervilles, after the President who set them up. But relief for their residents — escapees from the US’s economic collapse in the early 1930s and the Dust Bowl that then destroyed over-farmed land in Texas and Oklahoma — would have to wait Read more ...

The title sounds as if we ought to be in for an evening of Virginia Woolf, and, indeed, one of the astonishing women on view (Deborah Findlay) was in fact a co-star of the recent West End version of Orlando. In fact, this late-summer offering is a scorching reminder of the power of European theatre at a venue, the Almeida, that has of late focused its attentions (often very well) on the American repertoire, from Tennessee Williams to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, amongst others.I also can't remember a show that has foregrounded women so formidably. The French writer Annie Ernaux's 2008 "hybrid Read more ...

If I were a rich man, I'd be inclined to put together a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and send it around the world, a week here, a week there, to educate and entertain. But, like Tevye, I also have to sell a little milk to put food on the table, so I’ll just revel in the delights of this marvellous show in the theatrical village nestling within Regent’s Park.The book (by Joseph Stein based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem) pulls off one of great art’s essential tricks - it finds the universal in the specific. That’s why it ran for 3000+ performances on Broadway Read more ...

A Chorus Line reigned supreme on Broadway from 1975 to 1990, a bold, bare-bones piece that for once put musical theatre’s hoofers in the spotlight. “As welcome as a rainbow after a thunderstorm” was Clive Barnes’s summation in the New York Times.It was there when Aids began to decimate theatre-land, taking its creator, Michael Bennett, in 1987 too. It was a show that acknowledged the flesh and blood performers who went on making the magic happen and lent them added poignancy. And it presumably did so again in 2021, when the Curve Leicester created this production as a one-finger salute to Read more ...

The Mosinee Project, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★★In May 1950, a small US town awoke to hammer-and-sickle flags hanging from lamp-posts, its local newspaper transformed into a Soviet propaganda journal, its citizens’ firearms confiscated and handed to loyal communist troops, and – most alarmingly – its mayor detained under armed guard.It’s a fascinating and little-known byway of US history, and how the Wisconsin community of Mosinee arrived at that elaborate and eyebrow-raising simulation is the subject of the debut Fringe show from new theatre company Counterfactual. And what begins with a Read more ...

In the 1960s, Cilla Black was rescued from hat check duties at The Cavern and made a star. In the 1980s, Rick Astley was whisked away from tea-making at the Stock-Aitken-Waterman studios to launch, 30 years later. a billion RickRolls. In the 2020s, Frankie Taylor is spirited away from a Milton Keynes cinema popcorn stand to the bright (and I mean bright) lights of Bollywood. Okay, it’s the least likely of those unlikely routes to stardom, but this is Musical Theatre, a world in which if you just believe hard enough, you too can be the idol of millions, with all the dubious rewards that Read more ...