These shows, originally filmed as part of the flagship’s NT Live project, are now available on its YouTube channel. The first is Richard Bean’s gloriously silly farce, One Man, Two, Guvnors, starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.
BEGINNING – National Theatre & West End
It’s about three in the morning on a Saturday night in the living room of a one-bedroom flat in Crouch End. Laura is a 38-year-old managing director, and it’s the tail end of her housewarming party.
TRESTLE – Southwark Playhouse
Small is beautiful. And that is because two-handers can sometimes reach parts that other, bigger, plays fail to touch. This is certainly the case with Stewart Pringle’s Trestle.
THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE – Hampstead Theatre
The Slaves of Solitude is set in the winter of 1943. We are in the Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house, in Henley-on-Thames.
ALBION – Almeida Theatre
Albion begins with Audrey, played with indefatigable energy by Victoria Hamilton, in the garden of her deceased uncle’s family home, deep in the English countryside. She has bought the property, which boasts a historic 1920s garden, now much overgrown, which a First World War veteran once formed into a pastoral paradise fit for heroes.
WHAT SHADOWS – Park Theatre ★★★
As a play, there is so much in What Shadows that touches on and echoes today’s myriad trouble spots, it could hardly be more topical.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AMERICAN SERVICE MEN IN BRITAIN – Jermyn Street Theatre
We’re familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the image of Dad’s Army, gamely tramping down the country lanes and across the verdant fields of southern England during the second world war. But, at the time, there was also another army stationed in this green and pleasant land: the US Army.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AMERICAN SERVICE MEN IN BRITAIN – Jermyn Street Theatre
We’re familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the image of Dad’s Army, gamely tramping down the country lanes and across the verdant fields of southern England during the second world war. But, at the time, there was also another army stationed in this green and pleasant land: the US Army.
FILTHY BUSINESS – Hampstead Theatre
In Filthy Business, a comic epic, playwright Ryan Craig travels back in time to explore the poisonous and reptilian atmosphere of the Solomon family, the owners of a retail rubber business in North East London. As the title punningly suggests, a family working with rubber is prone to both physical dirtiness and moral corruption.
MY COUNTRY; A WORK IN PROGRESS – National Theatre & touring
Oh dear. The first play explicitly about Brexit is being staged by the National Theatre in a production that has all the acrid flavour of virtue signalling.
Text of the Day: Dead Funny
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
DEAD FUNNY – West End
Why is comedy, in the words of the cliché, such a serious business? One reason is that what we laugh at says a lot about who we are as a nation; another is that the simple “joy of laughter” drowns out the anxieties of life’s little, and not so little, agonies.
Text of the Day: Oil
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
MONSTER RAVING LOONY – Soho Theatre
Screaming Lord Sutch biog-play is raucously entertaining, but rather superficial and thin on content.
LAWRENCE AFTER ARABIA – Hampstead Theatre
Howard Brenton’s new study of desert warrior T E Lawrence is more like a frustrating mirage than a nourishing oasis.
TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT – Touring
Classic adaptation of the Graham Greene story is warm-hearted and entertaining, but also stuck in the past.
WASTE – National Theatre
Do scandals have a sell-by date? When it comes to sex and politicians, the answer is no. The tabloids, and the news-hungry public, still seem to relish a good story about a powerful man who is caught with his trousers around his ankles. So Harley Granville Barker’s Waste — first put on in 1907 and then rewritten some 20 years later — is ostensibly a highly relevant drama of a personal tragedy in which our characteristic national mix of prurience and puritanism gets a longwinded airing. Certainly, the plot is instantly recognisable.
David Hare: The Blue Touch Paper
David Hare is one of those playwrights who talks with enormous imaginative sympathy about the work of other writers. To read what he says about John Osborne or Harold Pinter is to have your view of them changed for ever. But when he first had the idea of writing about his own life, as opposed to his work, he was unsure.
THE MODERATE SOPRANO – Hampstead Theatre
David Hare’s charming new play is a very English account of a very English institution – Glyndebourne. The Moderate Soprano tells the story of John Christie, an eccentric English businessman who in the 1930s decided to build an opera house next to his house and garden in Sussex, thus creating Glyndebourne. But he didn’t do it alone.
FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS – Orange Tree Theatre
Over the past quarter century the reputation of toff playwright Terence Rattigan has been restored, mainly by strong stagings of his classic dramas, such as Deep Blue Sea. But his first smash hit, French Without Tears, has been the unicorn of his output — often talked about, often mentioned, often remembered, but never actually seen. Now Paul Miller, the ever-enterprising artistic director of the Orange Tree, has brought this unicorn into public view, allowing audiences to enjoy a joyful sighting of a rare beast.