It’s hard to time one’s arrival at a theatre. Problems with public transport, unpredicatable traffic and parking difficulties make delays likely and it is wise to plan to arrive in good time. So, if you do arrive quite early, what do you find ? Well, very often it is a small, crowded front of house area, a tiny bar with few seats and no admission to the auditorium until ten minutes before the show begins. Managers, you’ve got an empty auditorium. Let us in. We can sit and chat or read our programmes away from the foyer crush.
Sometimes it becomes obvious why entry is so late. There is some kind of pre-show presence onstage. I don’t mean a proper pre-show, such as a band playing or some jugglers or whatever. I mean an actor or two, performing some task ( knitting or reading a book, for example ) or just sitting there. Understandably, actors don’t want to be doing this for half an hour or so. There is a simple solution. Ditch this kind of pre-show. It adds nothing. I’d rather have my seat a little earlier.
rs and a trio of early plays by George Bernard Shaw ( Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Misalliance ), directed with great panache by Paul Miller. The place is tiny. The tickets are not expensive. How do they do it ?
mission, but from the mid 19th century until 1881 it was a music hall and it is as a music hall that it has been restored. The foyer space consists of a labyrinth of rooms, all now bars and cafes and the atmosphere is excited and lively. The real glory of the place, however, is the auditorium which gives new meaning 
to the word ‘atmospheric’. It is an absolute gem.
e Infants and the show suited the venue perfectly. A dark and intricate mixture of song, story-telling and puppetry, the show is by turns hilarious, shocking and strangely moving. Our thanks should go to John Earl, John Betjeman, Spike Milligan and all the others who campaigned and raised money for the restoration. For a detailed history go to 
This was a Theatre Royal, Stratford East production by Graeae Theatre but it reminded me so much of Everyman shows going back to its foundation in the 1960s. While celebrating the music of Ian Dury and the Blockheads the production laid into the Tories in no uncertain terms. We all ended up on our feet, singing a newly written protest song while looking at a screen where Theresa May, Boris Johnson, George Osborne and others of their ilk were shown sprouting Satanic horns. Subtle it wasn’t, but it hit the spot for this Everyman audience.
ver, were WRONG. This is not just my opinion but that of the audience who rose as one at the end to give the show a standing ovation. It is a beautifully written piece. It is witty and clever, unusual and perceptive. It is, to some extent, a state of the nation play and gets it exactly right. Over and over again during the evening the current political situation was woven into the fantastic, mythological world of the play. It is a patriotic play and, in the same way as Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, blends that patriotism with a sharp, satirical dose of criticism of the way things are going. John Heffernan was warmly engaging as George and it was great to see youngster Reuel Guzman doing so well in an unusually large and significant role for a young actor.
other by Githa Dowerby was the third superb show of the summer at the Minerva. Given one performance in a private club in 1924 and apparently not staged again until 2008, this play has all the power of the same author’s slightly better known work, Rutherford and Son. While the position of women in society, the laws of divorce and the class system have changed radically since 1924, the play, strangely, seems to have plenty to say to a modern audience. Eustace Gaydon, the villain of the piece, seems to be the spiritual ancestor of all those financiers responsible for the recent banking crisis who could not see that they had done anything wrong. Will Keen’s performance in this role was so captivating that, at several points, I felt like walking onto the stage to punch him on the nose.
realise, I LOVE the RSC. I have seen nearly 500 of their productions over many years. It therefore pains me to write the following. This summer’s production of Vice Versa was quite the worst RSC production I have ever seen. Who thought a show like this was the sort of thing the RSC should be producing ? It was like something you used to see in theatres at the ends of seaside piers in the 1960s. I am all for the RSC letting its hair down and coming up with a comedy romp from time to time but this was DIRE. Fart jokes and cries of “Stick it up his jaxi” no doubt have their place, although it is depressing to find them in the Swan. The worst thing, though, was the sheer feebleness of the jokes and the strained over the top performances. One interminable bit of business where items are removed from a shopping cart/crate accompanied by a series of puns would have been rejected by any self-respecting pantomime. Writer Phil Porter and director Janice Honeyman should be shown the door and never invited back.
nicus. In fact the entire cast were pitch perfect. One sign of a quality production (director, Blanche McIntyre) is the attention paid to detail and to the minor characters. Will Parsons, for example, as Young Lucius, with very few lines to work with, was totally convincing in his descent from proud grandson of Titus, arranging the family for a selfie, to a frightened, bewildered, haunted child, almost driven insane as the horrors of the story mount up. This was the highlight of the season.