Theatre

Arinzé Kene’s play Misty is a collection of rap numbers and skits about a fare dodger, Lucas, from Hackney. Lucas (played by Kene) gets into a scuffle on a bus and is later arrested for entering London Zoo without a ticket. That’s the entire narrative. Obviously, Kene can’t create an evening’s entertainment from such meagre pickings, so he turns his tribulations as a dramatist into the show’s second storyline. Playwrights moaning about writing plays is a theme of scant interest to audiences, but Kene enlists our sympathy by examining his quest to write a drama that satisfies both black people and the playgoing bourgeoisie. His friends predict that Lucas’s story

Hampstead’s boss Ed Hall was so impressed by Stephen Karam’s play The Humans that he wanted to direct it himself. Instead, thanks to a stunning series of accidents, he was able to bring the original Tony award-winning production from Broadway to London. And here it is, directed by Joe Mantello. It’s a family drama, which opens with Dad and Mom, in their sixties, arriving for Thanksgiving at a dingy New York apartment occupied by their daughter Brigid and her fiancé Richard. All the characters are heavily scarred by life. Richard, aged 38, hasn’t yet completed his sociology degree because he suffers from severe depression (possibly triggered by his subject choice,

Non-stop chatterbox and mystifyingly revered fabricator of sub-Chekovian paddywhackery, Brian Friel has received another production at the Donmar. His play Aristocrats cadges shamelessly from Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The setting is a crumbling mansion in Donegal occupied by four adult members of the O’Donnell clan (three girls, one boy), who idle around the place waiting for Dad to clock out so they can get their mitts on the bricks. Lindsey Turner’s production is curiously stripped of ornament. The characters are assembled on a lime-green patio, suggestive of mown grass, which is surmounted by a white frame with the dimensions of the goalposts at Wembley. To represent the mansion

For recovering teetotallers, like me, Thinking Drinkers is the perfect Edinburgh show. On stage, two sprucely dressed actors perform sketches about booze while a team of well-trained ushers race around plying the audience with strong liquor from plastic beakers. In under an hour, I swallowed a can of ale chased by vodka, gin, rum and Irish whiskey. It’s a decent show but, for obvious reasons, forgettable. Nina’s Got News is the first fringe play written by Frank Skinner. Nina has split up with her besotted boyfriend, Chris. When he answers a summons to her flat he’s hoping for a valedictory romp. But Nina has asked her best pal Vanessa over

David Greig has written the international festival’s flagship drama, Midsummer. This farcical romance is performed as a party piece by four actors supported by a plinky-plonky band playing satirical ballads. We meet two boozy drifters, Bob and Helena, who enjoy a night of rampant sex aftera chance encounter in an Edinburgh pub. Will their affair live or die? Well, since the show starts with two older actors reminiscing about the characters’ past we knowin advance how it all ends. An odd way to kill suspense. The lovers have little in common apart from alcoholism and the madcap plot sends them hurtling through a set of mishaps and scrapes as their

Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on stage to perform King Lear when Donald Trump’s voice interrupts him from the wings. The President threatens to kill him unless he delivers an accessible version of the Shakespeare classic ‘that isn’t boring’. With improvised puppets, Carl rattles through the play while Trump interrupts and offers directorial notes. Something weird happens. A curious mutual admiration springs up between the artist and his patron. Despite its messy presentation, the show works because Carl is a superb impressionist and his wide-ranging gags hit the mark more often than not. The action is

Gandalf, also known as Ian McKellen, has awarded himself another lap of honour by bringing King Lear back to London. Jonathan Munby directs. His eccentric decision to hire actors who don’t resemble their characters will baffle anyone who hasn’t studied the play in advance. The casting may be ‘colour-blind’, but the audience isn’t. Anita-Joy Uwajeh (Cordelia) evidently has no white ancestry and therefore cannot be Lear’s natural daughter. A newcomer might deduce that the king’s cruelty towards her stems from her second-class status as an adoptive child. And anyone trying to unravel that mystery will be equally baffled by Sinead Cusack’s Kent. Of the four women on stage in the

Alan Bennett’s new play, Allelujah!, is an NHS drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious local boy turned metropolitan yuppie, has arrived from London to visit his sick father and he takes the opportunity to assess the efficiency of the hospital on behalf of his bosses at the health department in Whitehall. Meanwhile, a TV crew has found evidence that a staff member is murdering elderly patients to create vacant beds for new arrivals. Bennett’s sentimental adoration of the NHS leads him to misrepresent a couple of political issues. It’s false to suggest that any well-run hospital is bound to be flogged to the commercial

Stefano Massini’s play opens with a man in a frock-coat reaching New York after six weeks at sea. The year is 1844 and young Henry Lehman has just emigrated from Bavaria to make his fortune. He started modestly with a general store in Montgomery, Alabama, serving local farmers. When wildfires destroyed the cotton crop on which the community relied, Lehman’s business ought to have failed but he saw his opportunity. Whatever possessions the farmers had lost they would have to purchase again. From him. He was joined by his brothers, Manny and Mayer, and they invented the profession of brokerage, ‘middle-men’ they called themselves, buying raw cotton from farmers and

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a knockabout farce set during the Troubles. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch it uses the expiry of a pet to examine human obsessiveness and self-delusion. But it takes two hours rather than three minutes to make its point. We meet a handsome terrorist, Padraic (Aidan Turner), whose adoration of his black cat symbolises his crazed devotion to republicanism. The cat is accidentally run over by Davey, an amiable twerp on a bike, who must find a new cat or face reprisals from the insanely brutal Padraic. Donny, Padraic’s dad, offers to help Davey and they borrow a ginger cat, which they blacken with boot

Listen to the crowd. I often delay passing judgment on a show until the audience delivers its verdict. This is especially true of plays that appeal primarily to women. Genesis Inc. by Jemma Kennedy presents us with two infertile mums. Serena is a clingy worrier whose aloof boyfriend, Jeff, resents forking out thousands for IVF. Bridget, a cocky City power-dresser, is keen to get herself impregnated by her gay best friend. Serena and Bridget don’t meet until the final scene so the play feels like two separate dramas, poorly merged. The fertility clinic, Genesis Inc., is owned by the smarmy Dr Marshall (Harry Enfield). He wants the firm to go

Intriguing word, ‘octoroon’. Does it mean an eight-sided almond-flavoured cakelet? No, it’s a person whose ancestry is one eighth black. New Yorker Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wants to explore this factoid in his farce An Octoroon, which opens with an angry African-American playwright delivering a comic monologue. He tells us a story about ‘my shrink’. Then he tells us that ‘my shrink’ doesn’t exist. Then he talks about ‘my shrink’ again. Right, so is ‘my shrink’ real or not? Obviously the writer doesn’t care. A second dramatist enters, an Irishman, in Victorian costume. This is Dion Boucicault, a 19th-century writer whose comedies were enormously popular in London and on Broadway. Boucicault’s opening

Polly Stenham starts her overhaul of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with the title. She gives the ‘Miss’ a miss and calls it Julie. The wonder of Strindberg is that his characters speak to us with such force, knowingness and candour that they seem to belong to our own era. Modernising the setting destroys the wonder. This is a textbook lesson in how to kill by transplantation. We’re in a London mansion owned by an absent billionaire whose chauffeur, Jean, is casually seduced by a trustafarian coke fiend, Julie, on the night of her 33rd birthday. Julie’s motives are lust, boredom, a need for attention and a perfunctory desire to sabotage Jean’s

The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been born in Dorset rather than in Co. Tyrone he’d have enjoyed an unremarkable career writing episodes of The Archers with the odd stint on Emmer-dale. He’s a champion witterer whose plays lack suspense, pace, depth or spectacle. His characters are constantly and infuriatingly nice to each other. Occasionally they rise to mild irascibility, or a spot of vituperative teasing, but that’s about it. When he needs a crisis he turns to external sources, to destiny or to happenstance, and his plays often end with dreadful sufferings being visited on russet-faced,

A most excellent fellow, Roger Allam. On the stage he brings dignity to all he does, in the noblest traditions of the British theatre. Off it he is a fully paid-up member of the human race, admired by his comrades as a man no less than as an actor. Some mummers, eager to let off steam, occasionally let the side down. Allam is the sort of chap — star and team player — who brings the profession into repute. Three times a winner of an Olivier award, twice for best actor, he is currently to be found on the West End stage in The Moderate Soprano, David Hare’s touching portrait

Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a successful screen-writer, to audition his wife for a movie. Isaac improvises a scene with the wife and then fondles her bottom as they perform a weirdly sexless dance that is supposed to symbolise something, but it’s unclear what because everything that preceded the dance was indecipherable. Then the interval. I looked for enlightenment in the

Nine Night refers to a Jamaican custom that obliges bereaved families to party non-stop for more than a week following the death of a parent. When Gloria expires her relatives arrive from all parts of London and the Caribbean to indulge in a boozy blow-out. Gloria’s daughter Lorraine tussles with her businessman brother, Robert, who wants to stave off bankruptcy by flogging the family home immediately. Their half-sister, Trudy, arrives from Jamaica and collapses in hysterics over her abandonment by Gloria in infancy. Everyone lives in fear of Auntie Maggie, a pious matriarch, who uses a walking stick and whose religious devotion conceals the heart of an emotional despot. Cecilia