London theatre reviews

How do you take two national treasures and make them really quite awful and annoying? Well, like this. Celia Imrie is Beth, the strong-willed, callous, possessive mother of Tamsin Greig’s meeker, milder Bo in Anna Mackmin’s repetitive exploration of motherhood, which seems desperate to be unconventional but plays out with a plodding realism from the opening medical crisis to the inevitable end. 

The first new Bridge Theatre production in over two years is a bit like excitedly running off to meet an old friend you haven’t seen in ages and then finding the conversation is… okay but a bit stilted…

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be in the headlines every day, this densely philosophical techno-thriller by Beau Willimon – creator and showrunner of Netflix’s House of Cards – certainly feels timely…

Playwright Mike Bartlett’s impressively mercurial career has taken in everything from droll sci-fi epics to faux Shakespearean verse satires. Much of his work is dizzyingly grandiose, but within it there’s a definite sub genre of pared-back, small-cast ‘relationship dramas’, notably Cock and Bull. Unicorn is in this tradition, being a stripped back three hander on the topic of polyamory.

In Coral Wylie’s nature-driven debut, absence and presence blur and spike. Pip - also played by Wylie – is a non-binary 19-year-old trying to make sense of themselves and their world. To do this, they keep a diary; filling it up with heavy feelings. ‘I don’t know myself. I don’t know how to fix it,’ they write.

In my notes to the Globe’s first ever production of a Chekhov play I’d scrawled and underlined the word ‘BECKETTIAN!!’, thinking I was making a piercing and original observation that, yes, this take on Three Sisters had a certain Samuel Beckett vibe to it. Afterwards I looked at adaptor/translator Rory Mullarkey’s accompanying essay, and noted that he begins it with a quote from Waiting for Godot, so maybe he wasn’t intending to be as subtle as all that, but it’s nice to know you’re on the right track…

There is, believe it or not, a tangible microgenre of plays about AI personality replicas being downloaded into new human bodies. Here’s another one. Under the name Kandinsky Theatre, Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman have devised an eclectic stream of science-rooted theatre shows. Now they make their debut at the Court with an occasionally heavy-handed but ultimately moving drama about a woman brought back to life some 50 years after her death.

One thing’s for sure: tonight’s radically modernised Sophocles revival starring an Oscar-winning American actor was a lot better than last night’s radically modernised Sophocles revival starring an Oscar-winning American actor. 

He was the boy who nearly made it. So now Martin lives in the shadow of what he could have been – a millionaire, uber-famous film star. In 1999, at the age of 10, he came down to the last two for the role of Harry Potter, but fell at the last hurdle. The rest is history and his competitor Daniel Radcliffe (or, as Martin likes to call him - He Who Should Not Be Named) went on to become a household name…