Lynn Faces by Laura Horton – Summerhall, Edinburgh
An all-female punk band led by Lynn, Alan Partridge’s abysmally treated assistant, is a eye-catching concept. Laura Horton’s play is about a woman, played by herself, taking back the initiative in her life. It is an uneasy mix of farce and darker underlying themes of coercive control. Horton’s supportive group of friends are willing to humour her punk gig ambitions, but really their support is helping her confront the toxic relationship she is struggling to escape. This is rather undermined by the idea that the group is hopeless at music, and don’t have the perspective to see this. While songs like ‘My Snazzy Cardigan’ are funny, the play can’t decide whether it wants to take its characters seriously or not, meaning the audience doesn’t know either.

Divine Invention by Sergio Blanco – Summerhall, Edinburgh
A man sits at a table, surrounded by objects – books, a microscope, a bone – and a pile of paper. He tells us he is going to read a 30 page text he’s written, and then does so, remaining seated throughout. It sounds like the opposite of drama, but Sergio Blanco’s play as performed by Daniel Goldman is strangely engrossing. The text is above the nature of love, a reflection on Romeo and Juliet apparently commissioned by the Globe Theatre. It unfolds as a shattering personal experience, but the identity of the writer and story-teller remain opaque. Blanco is a Franco-Uruguayan writer, Goldman his translator and collaborator. What happens in the piece is based on reality, but the boundaries keep shifting. The show is a strangely mesmerising hour, conjuring an emotional landscape in our heads.

So Young by Douglas Maxwell – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

So Young addresses one of society’s greatest taboos – an older man and a younger woman. Can a relationship with a generation gap be healthy, genuine and based on choice? A couple, played by Lucianne McEvoy and Andy Clark, have a comfortable, convincing relationship but it becomes apparent that their visit to an old friend (Nicholas Karimi) is overshadowed by the recent death of his wife, breaking up a close-knit group. And he has a new partner, Yana Harris, who is at least twenty years his junior. Feelings of unresolved grief at the loss of a friend combine with confusion over what to feel about his new life. Douglas Maxwell’s drama is classy, uncomfortable writing that leaves us wondering how we would react in similar circumstances, and whether we’d be right.

Batshit by Leah Shelton – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Leah Shelton’s one woman show takes the experience of her grandmother, who spent time in an institution during the 1960s. Shelton exposes the mysogyny of Australian society which, in those days, pathologised women who were not happy in the traditional role of a wife. The theme is important, but the show fails to deliver the insight required to take it beyond what we might expect. Alternative performance techniques are deployed, from archive footage to singing and audience reaction, but they distract rather than enlightening. With limited information on how her grandmother really felt, plus extensive discussion of her medical records, the show feels a little exploitative and prioritises effect over focus.

A Brief History of Difference by DAS Clarks – Summerhall, Edinburgh

DAR Rogers has created a highly personal show, an intimate story-telling experience delivered in a naturalistic style. With a room full of props, Rogers tells her own life story in a style that is disarming and deceptively casual. She talks about identity and gender difference, but what makes the show special is her use of movement. She is not a dancer, so when she dances it is truthful and moving. Co-creators Becky Davies and Jo Fong (herself known for the excellent The Rest of Our Lives) have shaped this into something that makes complete sense on its own terms – funny, moving, and clever.

Shotgunned by Matt Anderson – Space at Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh

Matt Anderson’s two-hander tracks a relationship, from its end back to its beginning. Couple  Roz (Liv Bradley) and Dylan (Brad Follen) have a conventional experience of meeting, falling for one another and moving in together, but when they have a miscarriage things become complicated and difficult. The drama is straightforward, but performances are very likeable and the theme of loss is explored in a way that feels convincing and real.

These Are the Contents of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show) by Salty Brine – Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh

Salty Brine is a force of nature, a drag queen with a roof-raising voice. He creates a cabaret evening, complete with band and musical director, which ingeniously combines autobiography with songs from Annie Lennox’s 1992 album ‘Diva’ and ‘The Awakening’ by Kate Chopin. His love of literature is infectious and his stage presence magnetic. He turns Lennox songs into something far more intense and emotive than the original, and brings the audience with him from start to finish.

Show Pony by still hungry & Bryony Kimmings – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Shows about the reality of circus performance have been a feature of the last few Fringes. Show Pony continues the theme with a very personal account from three German artists – Lena Ries, Anke van Engelshoven and Romy Seibt – who explain that they are past their circus prime and worried about the future. Expressing themselves through their respective disciplines, they perform remarkable physical and acrobatic feats while illustrating how brutal their profession can be, especially for women. A fine combination of entertainment and an examination of social expectations.

Cyrano by Virginia Gay – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Virgina Gay’s reimagining of Edmond de Rostand’s classic, Cyrano de Bergerac, is bold and brilliant. Gay takes a chainsaw to the old play, pulling apart its questionable sexual politics and looking for a new way to stage it that does not involve the sexually deception of Roxanne. A string of super-charismatic performances engage the audience throughout, not least from Gay who is a force of nature. Jessica Whitehurst’s Roxanne is a better person than everyone else in the play, while Brandon Grace as Yan (Christian) is hilariously pretty but dumb. They are supported by a chorus of three characters in search of a play, who bicker entertainingly throughout. The show is highly original, and a modern re-imagining that makes it hard to see how this play can every be the same again.

Loveletter by Camille O’Sullivan – Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh

Back for her 20th Fringe, Camille O’Sullivan’s exceptional voice and choice of repertoire has a loyal following. Combining her classics (Ship Song, Look Mummy No Hands) with new material (a remarkable version of Paranoid Android), Camille also pays tribute to her friends Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan with powerful accounts of their music. A special evening.

300 Paintings by Sam Kissajukian – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Australian comedian Sam Kissajukian was diagnosed with bi-polar after giving up comedy and embarking on an unhinged 5-month manic episode in which he painted 300 pictures. What could have been a tough story of mental breakdown is one of the funniest one-man shows on the Fringe, cheerfully blending theatre and comedy. Kissajukian, who now manages his disease, has complete perspective on what happened to him. His account of the extent to which he wound people up, especially a senior, unnamed, US tech entrepreneur, are wild, bizarre and expertly delivered. It is impossible not to love a show that tells heavy stories lightly.

The Flock by Roser López Espinosa / Moving Cloud by Sofia Nappi – Zoo Southside, Edinburgh

These two pieces, performed by the Scottish Dance Theatre company, are dazzling exhibitions of movement. The Flock, premiered in Catalonia, recreates the movement and murmuration of birds. Mark Drillich and Ilia Mayer’s propulsive electronic soundtrack combines with a virtuoso ensemble performance. Moving Cloud is performed to a Celtic folk soundtrack which, fascinatingly, combines reels and jigs with entirely different movement on stage. Dancing again as a group, the performers weave a constantly shifting tapestry which has the audience spellbound.

Triptych by Lewis Major – Dancebase, Edinburgh

There is a style of contemporary dance that looks perfect and feels cold. Lewis Major’s Triptych features three dancers striking poses amid cones and blades of light cutting across the dark stage. Visually, it is a dramatic experience, but the surface seems to be everything. The inclusion of female nudity also feels titillating and cheap, included for effect. The result is a trio that fails to move.

Burnout Paradise by Pony Cam Collective – Summerhall, Edinburgh

You’ve never seen a performance like this. Australian company Pony Cam’s show is about burnout, and there’s no mistaking the theme. Four performers run for 10 minutes on treadmills. Then they switch and do it again, and again, and again. While they run they carry out a set of tasks – cooking a three course meal for two audience members, completing a long list of supposed leisure activities, performing an individual story, and (my favourite) completing a live grant application to Creative Scotland. They also aim to beat their collective distance record for the show and, if they miss any of their targets, promise the audience their money back. The result is frantic, chaotic, hilarious and genuinely quite dangerous. The performers physical commitment is astonishing and, by the time they wrap it up with a recreation of OK Go’s ‘Here It Goes Again’ video, they look shattered. It’s a superbly entertaining show.

The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return by Sam Edmunds – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Chalk Line Theatre perform a coming of age story about young people in Luton. It’s a fairly conventional story of growing up and the dangers of bullies and knives, until it turns in an unexpected direction. Edmunds does a impressive job of representing the experience of being young and trying to find your way in an unforgiving urban environment. His young cast bring it alive, and the play delivers a message of hope that confounds the usual dramatic trajectory of inevitable tragedy.

QUEENS by Anne Welenc – Summerhall, Edinburgh

QUEENS has a great scenario – Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart in purgatory as drag queens – and impressive costumes. The three German stars (there’s also Penthisilea, Queen of the Amazons – played by a woman) look awesome and have a lot of fun together. Other than that, it’s hard to pin down actual events. The show is more of a happening that anything that claims to have structure or narrative, definitely a candidate for fringiest show of 2024.

Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse for England by Alex Hill – Underbelly, Edinburgh

The defining image of the 2020 European Championships final, played at Wembley in 2021, was a fan, trousers down, flare blazing between his buttocks. Alex Hill’s one-man play tracks how someone might end up doing that. The central character, engagingly played by Hill, is an AFC Wimbledon fan (Dons supporters may well take issue with the club being used as a cypher for bad supporters). He gets in with a crowd of hardcore fans, drawn into drink, drugs and violence. As he gets more deeply involved, his best friend is cut adrift. Hill adeptly turns a story of toxic masculinity into a cautionary tale about what happens when men don’t talk to each other.

plewds by Kathrine Payne – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Kathrine Payne play, which they perform, combines multiple techniques to tell a story that the performer seems unwilling to explain or address. Disguised as a hardboiled detective conducting an investigation into what happened on a certain night, appearing as a French impresario, channelling vintage X-Factor, and Payne throw everything at us. It’s a thoroughly unpredictable show, in which everything is a distraction from the fact that the people closest to us can be the ones who hurt us the most. It’s funny, involving, and wildly inventive.

Pericles by William Shakespeare – Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Published at Plays International

Pericles is perhaps the least well-regarded of William Shakespeare’s play: episodic, fantastical, thematically confusing, and written with an unknown collaborator (possibly, but not definitely, brothel-keeper George Wilkins). Even the Royal Shakespeare Company only undertakes it occasionally, the last time 18 years ago. So it is a bold choice for new RSC co-artistic director Tamara Harvey’s first Stratford Shakespeare and, it turns out, an inspired one. With a company of actors mostly making their RSC debuts, this production is a chance for Harvey to make a statement about how she and fellow boss Daniel Evans see the future for the country’s premier classical company. It is a major achievement that she leaves the audience wondering why they know so little about such a spellbinding play.

The plot of Pericles is absurd if judged as realism, but as a story with its origins in Greek myth the play makes a lot more sense. The titular character roams the Eastern Mediterranean beset by assassins, shipwrecks, and the apparent loss of his country, his wife and his daughter. It is a picaresque adventure, powered by terrible personal loss and impossible redemption. It is also a review of government, as Pericles encounters leaders who are in turn depraved, honest, deceitful and, finally, converted from sin to an honest life. Events derived from the realms of myth provide a lens for examining the way mortal men and women respond to power.

Jonathan Fensom’s simple set, draped with ropes and hung with astrolabes, turns the Swan Theatre into a ship. Or rather, it reveals that the much-loved auditorium has always been a ship – its wooden balconies decks and its thrust stage a prow. Striking, beautiful costumes by Kinnetia Isidore are Greek but also Levantine, Indian, Japanese – tunics and robes slashed with colour, setting the play in a distant, semi-fictional past. And Claire van Kampen’s music, full of swirling woodwind, with a modern song neatly inserted, places us firmly in a land of imagination. What brings these elements together is the use of movement, choreographed by Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster, with the full cast constantly on stage striking tableau or writhing en masse to create vivid settings out of nothing. We know which city we are in – and there are several – simply by the way they move. As a binding visual motif it is a brilliant concept, bringing unity to the disparate plot strands and timelines.

For this to work, the company has to work exceptionally well together, and Harvey’s cast is a tight and compelling group. They are led by Pericles, played by Alfred Enoch who, a somewhat naïve perennial optimist, is relentlessly ground down by the horrors he experiences until he is left mute, perched on the edge of the stage while the action continues without him. His reunion scenes with Marina, and with his lost wife Thaisa, are genuinely moving but, in a very well-judged performance, he leaves the distinct impression that his mind may be lost beyond redemption. He is permanently changed by grief, even though the people he thought lost have returned.

Harvey makes the clever decision to give the part of the play’s chorus, Gower, to Marina, Pericles’ daughter. This places Marina, who would otherwise not appear until Act IV, on stage throughout the play, albeit as a baby in a couple of scenes. It also makes the potentially distancing narration conspiratorial, and sympathetic, drawing us in. Rachelle Diedericks’ excellent performance is honest, open, and credible. We believe that she really can convert punters from their sinful ways, in the notorious brothel scenes. The play’s themes of hope, acceptance, and love are as relevant now as ever.

The cast is uniformly strong. Felix Hayes is darkly louche as the incestuous King Antiochus, and very funny as a gaping Pander and a somewhat touched Fisherman. Christian Patterson has the audience in the palm of his hand as the jovial King Simonides. Chukwuma Omabala is ravaged by disaster as King Cleon, in a Macbeths-style double-act with his scheming wife Dionyza (Miriam O’Brien, cooly understudying the indisposed Gabby Wong). Leah Haile’s Thaisa is totally assured, and Philip Bird’s staunch retainer Helicanus holds much of the play together. There are distinctive memorable performances in multiple roles across the cast, including from Jacqueline Boatswain, Sam Parks, Miles Barrow and Chyna-Rose Frederick. It is easy to imagine many of these actors becoming Stratford favourites in the years to come, part of a lineage neatly summed up by a departing audience member who remarked that he had seen Alfred Enoch’s father (Russell Enoch) in the first RSC season he watched, in 1970.

The production’s coherent vision makes light of the play’s supposed difficulties, and reveals it as an enchanting mixture of allegory, story-telling, romance and wish-fulfilment. Tamara Harvey’s revival of this unloved piece is something of a revelation. She makes a powerful case for a company that can bring fresh perspective to texts we think we already know, and give us the theatre we did not realise we needed. This is of course why the RSC exists and, on the evidence so far, the future looks very promising.

Sara Hazemi, Nojan Khazai, Nadia Albina, Lanna Joffrey. Photo by Richard Davenport.

English by Sanaaz Toossi – Kiln Theatre, London

Published at Plays International.

‘English’ is set in a classroom of the kind recognisable throughout the world: stackable chairs, melamine tables, a whiteboard. In Anisha Fields’ set, we can only locate it more precisely is because the door is open, revealing wall paintings outside that tell us we are somewhere in Asia. The class is learning English as a foreign language, studying for a qualification which, it becomes apparent, is crucial to the characters’ aspirations, whether for  work, family or personal identity. Everything, in fact, depends on being an English speaker. Failure to speak ‘English’ holds you down and holds you back, even if you are only truly yourself in your native language.

Sanaaz Toossi’s play, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, premièrs in the UK in a production directed by Diyan Zora, in her Royal Shakespeare Company debut. The show transfers from The Other Place in Stratford, the first RSC production at the Kiln in 15 years. Following ‘Cowbois’ at the Royal Court earlier this year, it is a further step towards re-establishing the RSC’s new writing presence in London. ‘English’ is a pre-approved, gold standard piece rather than a risky commission, but Diyan Zoya’s production gives British audiences a welcome opportunity to see for themselves what the fuss is about 

The language class in question takes place in Iran, where Toossi’s family originate. It is set in an indeterminate era when CD and DVD players are teaching technology, any time between now and 20 years ago. It is a low-key but engaging piece, in which five characters – four pupils and their teacher – interact as the course progresses revealing, to us and to themselves, why they are learning English.

The play’s underlying theme is colonisation. Direct colonial rule may be mostly in the past, but the cultural power of the English language remains as powerful as ever. In countries across the world, respect, identity, employment, power are dependent on the favourable perceptions of English speakers. Toossi explores this theme with subtlety and power, cleverly using the actors’ normal accents to indicate that they are speaking Farsi, and Iranian accents when they speak English. This simple device neatly exposes the contrast between the fluency with which they express themselves in their own language and the straitjacket of a foreign tongue. Yet the pupils have different attitudes to English. Frustrated Ellam, played by Serena Mateghi, rails against the test and the teaching, but keeps coming back. Goli (Sara Hazemi) is young, adaptable and sees possibilities rather than barriers. Roya (Lana Joffrey) is a grandmother, out of her depth but determined not to be frozen out by her emigrée family. And Omid (Nojan Khazai) riles everyone by being just too good at classes. Overseeing them, the teacher Marjan (Nadia Albina) once lived in Manchester, and struggles with her cultural identity.

All the cast put in engaging performances, drawing the audience into the group’s dynamics. Many scenes have wit and charm, and are clearly based on a deep understanding of what it feels like to never belong, either in Iran or in the West. The play’s perceptive politics are its strength, but Toossi’s plotting and character management is less so. While the set-up is fascinating, very little that is unexpected happens in the play and plot development sometimes seems written too much by numbers. The sexual tension between Marjan and Omid does not tell us much, and the abrupt disappearance of Roya who, like the Fool in King Lear, is never mentioned again seems odd. The play is traditional in form, telling its story from start to finish through characters who mostly talk around a table. ‘English’ gives us plenty to think about. However, the lack of any reference to the situation of the characters, particularly the women, within Iranian society creates a gap in our understanding of what is really happening, or how people make decisions about their lives. The production also leaves us seeking a level of disruption, challenge or experimentation that is absent, to give us the sense we have seen something truly unexpected. 

Photo: Von Fox Promotions

The Bounds by Stewart Pringle – Royal Court Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

The entirety of Stewart Pringle’s ‘The Bounds’ takes place on a small patch of earth. Grass and soil have, in Verity Quinn’s perfectly pitched set, erupted from beneath the boards, bursting through. Generally we wouldn’t generally give the muddy hillock, nor the people standing on it, a second glance – and this invisibility is the play’s driving theme. It’s 1553. Percy (Ryan Nolan) and Rowan (Lauren Waine) are taking part in an inter village football match ressembling the Ashbourne Shrove Tuesday match still played today. The game maraudes across two parishes, Allendale and Catton, which are bitter rivals. It involves everyone and goes as long as it takes, which could be a couple of days. But, despite Percy and Rowan’s dedication to the Allendale cause, they seem to have been stationed as far from the action as possible, and it becomes apparent they are outsiders in other ways too. Then a third character appears, Samuel (Soroosh Lavasani), richer and more educated but also an outsider, and a threat in ways they can’t quite define.

Pringle’s writing gleefully mashes modern idioms and ways of thinking with the Tudor setting, creating a play that is both very funny, and highly insightful. The play has Blackadder-esque village comedy, played with complete commitment by Nolan and Waine, but always with an undercurrent of menace in the background. At first we think it’s down to Percy, angry at being taken for a fool, but deeper political currents are swirling. Samuel is not what he seems, and there is change afoot. Under the apparently distant ‘boy king’, Edward VI, in far away London, land is being claimed, boundaries moved, and riotous football matches banned. The gentry are represented by an aloof boy (played by several young actors) who wanders in and tears Percy’s reality apart with a few casual words. Meanwhile Rowan has scars on her neck inflicted by her own village, where she has been branded a scold.

The ambition of ‘The Bounds’ is impressive, and Pringle has a clear social mission reminiscent of writers such as John Arden, who delved into the past to overturn our assumptions about history and identity Tightly directed by Jack McNamara for Newcastle-based company Live Theatre, the small cast are excellent. Nolan is a bug-eyed powder keg, Waine kind under a tough carapace, and Lavasani a smooth operator who is out of his depth. The play’s coup de grace is its finale, as it breaks out of its Tudor setting and reaches for universal resonance. The era-switch, with echoes of Alistair MacDowall’s The Glow, is a thrilling device, subtly signalled through slight dissonances in language. It breaks the hyper-local setting wide open, linking it to millions of working people lined up on battlefields through centuries of wars. Pringle, himself from Allendale, opens up the past and shows us things we’ve seen but not understood. ‘The Bounds’ is new writing of the highest quality.

L’Amore Del Cuore (Heart’s Desire) by Caryl Churchill – Coronet Theatre, Londo

Published at Plays International.

Italian company lacasadargilla bring their touring production of Caryl Churchill’s short play, A Heart’s Desire, to the Coronet Theatre, home to quality European theatre. Very few venues in the UK specialise in drama from the Continent. Arguably there are none beyond the Edinburgh Festival, so we should be very grateful to Artistic Director Anda Winters. The quality of stage work outside the UK, in countries such as Belgium, Ireland and Germany, is often very high. The instinct to push expectations and explore the boundaries of the form lies at the heart of theatre culture in a way rarely seen in the UK mainstream, and lacasadargilla exemplify this spirit of challenge. So does Caryl Churchill. Undoubtedly our greatest living playwright, she does not receive the hometown love she deserves and seems more appreciated elsewhere. It falls to an excellent Italian company to revive an essentially forgotten play from 1997. L’Amore Del Cuore fully affirms the quality of Churchill’s work.

Three family members sit around a table, waiting for their daughter whose homecoming is expected any moment . The dialogue keeps starting again, as they repeat the same lines with variations in tone and content. Different versions of the scene play out, driven by the stage directions which are read out, subtitled from the Italian along with the dialogue, by a fourth character (Fortunato Leccese) who occasionally enters to play the family’s wayward son. The repetitions are freighted with suppressed violence. Francesco Villano, as the husband, is a menacing stage presence, working himself into a frenzy of accusation against his wife (Tania Garriba), sometimes in a whisper, sometimes a table banging fury. Sister-in-law Alice Palazzi is stuck awkwardly in between. As the repeated scenarios develop, the drama becomes surreal and disconcerting, combining Ionesco with Pinter. In one version, gunmen notionally burst onto the set and mow the cast down. In another, a giant, unseen bird interrupts the action leaving the cast gazing speechlessly up at the circle.

The play is very technically demanding, requiring the dialogue to be performed at double speed, or lines to be edited down to only their final word, and accompanying gesture. The cast are more than up to the job, exhibiting highly impressive timing and physical skills. Director Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli choreographs the show brilliantly, aided by a cast who accelerate unerringly from zero to sixty in a thrilling hour that is entirely involving, despite its formal experimentation. Churchill’s play is funny and disconcerting, but underneath it is an exploration of how people really think, rather than how they are conventionally presented on stage. The multiple versions of the text reflect both the writing process, constantly rethinking and redrafting, and the rehearsal process, playing lines in different ways before settling on a final version. In turn, L’Amore Del Cuore reflects the overlapping thought processes taking place when any group of people interacts. It represents the impossibility of true communication and understanding, with our true thoughts concealed by rituals and obscured by social expectations. Churchill’s writing is moving as well as clever, sharing strong bonds with Beckett. lacasadargilla’s production is a fine evening’s theatre – challenging and entertaining, leaving the audience delighted at what they have experienced.

Jo Fong and George Orange. Photo by Sara Teresa.

The Rest of Our Lives by Jo Fong & George Orange – Battersea Arts Centre, London

In the two years since I first saw The Rest of Our Lives, the trigger notice outside the theatre with its warning of ‘middle aged content’ has started to seem slightly more relevant. The excellent Jo Fong and George Orange have been touring their show about being a certain age since the 2022 Edinburgh Festival, and it remains an absolute delight. Although clearly never quite the same from one night to the next, their performances remain recognisable, and scenes return with just as much impact as they had on first viewing. The show is a serious of set pieces which appear minimal but, on closer inspection, require both significant discipline and physical stamina. Jo and George fit themselves through the frames of metal chairs, entwine , and support one another physically, illustrating themes of interdependence without ever saying so. George sometimes look as though he’s about to do something very reckless, and everyone including Jo is relieved when he doesn’t. Nevertheless, his physical presence is powerful, as is Jo’s in a more contained way.

The Rest of Our Lives uses music in an inspired way, from Hosier’s ‘Take Me to the Church’ which supplies ironic drama to Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’, which the pair simply grimace along to, until Jo eventually bursts out with the single ‘motherfucker’ in the chorus. It’s very funny. The show is also an unusual shared experience, into which the audience is happy to throw themselves. A mass game of ping pongs using several bags of balls and lot of bats gets everyone in the mood and then the surtitles that seem to be in charge of the show open up the stage to the audience. It becomes an increasingly sweaty disco as pretty much everyone gets stuck in to some tunes well-chosen for the 40s plus demographic. It’s remarkably cathartic, and Jo and George have lighted upon something with their instinctive audience connection. The Rest of Our Lives is subtle and experimental, but also accessible and joyous – a rare combination.

Roger Evans and Michael-Sheen. Image by Johan-Persson

Nye by Tim Price – National Theatre: Olivier, London

Tim Price’s new play about Aneurin Bevan, directed by Rufus Norris on the Oliver stage, is a political biography told from the hospital bed which Nye will not be leaving. On morphine, his terminal cancer kept from him by his wife, fellow MP Jennie Lee, he relives a hallucinatory, often surreal version of his life, from the son of a Tredegar miner to Britain’s most successful left wing politician. As Bevan, Michael Sheen puts in a performance that the whole play revolves around, sometimes literally as nurses wheel dance bed-bound patients around the ward, fellow politicians bear him aloft, and the production threatens to break into song and dance. Sheen is powerful, expertly conveying Nye from a small boy to a dying man with nothing more than changes in physical behaviour, always wearing the same pair of pyjamas.

Norris’ direction brings an intoxicatingly surreal air to much of the production. A bullying teacher stalks the stage with two giant canes, like a spider. Parliamentarians advance on Bevan in menacing chorus line. A South Wales library comes to life, offering its books to the young Nye. The play’s main problem is that this intentionally cartoonish style works against the political analysis that provides its credibility. Political documentary plays are much harder to get right than we imagine, post-James Graham and, while ‘Nye’ is highly informative, it also begs questions. For instance, the treatment of Jennie Lee, excellently played by Sharon Small, seems reductive. It is impossible to know what basis the scenes in which she refuses to tell Nye how ill he is, before realising she way wrong, have in truth, but they seem to throw a woman who was an important politician in her own right under the bus for dramatic effect. There is also an overall sense that the play is only open to the mildest of criticism of its central hero.

Nevertheless, there is much to admire in the show. The cast have an excellent time, with some enjoyable weird performances – Nicholas Khan as a sneering Neville Chamberlain, Tony Jayawardana as a hilarious Churchill, Stephanie Jacob as Atlee in a bald wig, and Jon Furlong as a gleefully malicious Herbert Morrison. Kezrena James also stands out as a compassionate but practical nurse, the representation of the system Nye established against determined opposition, including from some in his party, and from the British Medical Association, who prioritised their members’ personal interests over the collective until the last possible moment.

Vicki Mortimer’s set, consisting of hospital screens that pull across the stage, at one point forming Commons benches, is very clever. The play’s timing is not accidental. The conflict between right and left in the Labour Party has clear messages for the current Opposition, and indeed Ed Miliband was in the audience the night I saw the play. The National Theatre has an important role in delivering new perspectives on our history to influence the way we move forward, and ‘Nye’ definitely does that. There is no bad time for a reminder of the reasons the NHS was set up, the entrenched interests that opposed it, and the benefits it has provided, but this is a production with an urgent message about the decisions we will, as a nation, make very soon.