Fergus Morgan

‘Noises Off’ transfers to the West End in Autumn 2019. This review is from its premiere at Lyric Hammersmith in July 2019. Something brilliant happened during press night of ‘Noises Off’, Michael Frayn’s famous farce about a farce: the lights died, and an apologetic stage manager had to confess to the audience that there had been a technical hitch. For that to happen in any show is unlucky; to happen during a comedy about a theatre show collapsing around its actors is exquisitely ironic. Indeed, half the audience thought it was part of the play, which tells you something about the furious, frenetic, metatheatrical nature of Frayn’s play, first produced at this very theatre almost 40 years ago and revived now by heavyweight director Jeremy Herrin. It takes place over three acts. The first is the torturous technical rehearsal of a touring production of a fictional bedroom farce. The second spins the set around and shows the backstage chaos halfway through the run. The third puts us in the audience during the production’s final weeks, when the set is falling apart and the cast want to kill each other. Good farce isn’t just about slamming doors and mistaken identity, it’s about human frailty as well. ‘Noises Off’, though, is a great farce: it manages to be about both those things and simultaneously works as an affectionate love letter to regional theatre. It’s also an incredibly intricate piece of writing – particularly the second act, when the mayhem ‘backstage’ has to match up

Well this is, um, weird. And bad. Jonathan Maitland, who’s previously penned successful plays about Geoffrey Howe and Jimmy Savile, puts an altogether more contentious figure on stage for his latest work: the ex-London Mayor, ex-Foreign Secretary, and old Etonian MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. It doesn’t go well: ‘The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson’ is a distinctly disjointed, horribly ham-fisted attempt at satire, redeemable only thanks to the handful of decent impressions served-up by its hard-working cast. Armando Iannucci this ain’t. The first half revolves around the infamous 2016 Islington dinner party at which Johnson and Michael Gove agonised over which side they would support in the EU referendum. The second takes place ten years into the future, when an aged Johnson once again sees a referendum as his ticket to the top, only this time he’s supporting rejoining the EU – ‘Brentry’, as Maitland has it. Churchill, Thatcher and Blair pop-up from time to time as his recalcitrant conscience. It is, at its heart, an attempt to skewer the BoJo myth, to reveal the man behind the buffoonery. But there’s precious little insight here, either psychological or political; you don’t have to be Laura Kuenssberg to know that Boris just wants to be PM, at all costs. The jokes are basic, too – tired old tropes that stopped being funny about three years ago. Boris speaks funny! Boris has messy hair! Boris sleeps around! Ha! Perhaps it’s just the Donald Trump paradox: a man so absur

What a weird way to end. Edward Hall, a talented director whose ten-year reign at the Hampstead Theatre was marred by a 2017 protest at the lack of female creatives on his main stage, opts to bow out with what is perhaps the oldest, whitest, malest play in London right now: Howard Brenton’s ‘Jude’, an ill-advised adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’. Brenton’s modernised retelling might have a female lead, but in every other respect – the pseudo-intellectual dialogue, the entitled toying around with sensitive subjects, the lazy stereotyping – it is wince-worthily out of touch.  There’s just so much that feels uncomfortable. The updated plot takes on far too much at once – Jude is Judith, an Ancient Greek-spouting Syrian refugee who simultaneously dodges the authorities and desperately tries to get into Oxford to study classics. It’s ‘Good Will Hunting’ crossed with ‘The History Boys’ crossed with ‘The Jungle’. A china shop of the refugee crisis, educational diversity, radicalisation and institutional racism into which the bull-like Brenton, best intentions and all, cheerfully wades.  Then there’s the titular character: a squeamishly sexualised Syrian teenager, part vodka-chugging nymphomaniac, part ‘Iliad’-loving bookworm, and entirely ludicrous. Then there’s the outdated fetishisation of Oxbridge and the awkward crowbarring-in of Greek verse (which has to be even more awkwardly translated by another character). Then there’s the ill-fitting subplot about a pig farm

What is the point of this? As in, what possible reason could there be for reviving this? John Gray and Eric Peterson’s ‘Billy Bishop Goes To War’ is a two-man musical about a prolific Canadian airman in the First World War, but whereas modern theatrical approaches to WWI tend to focus on the tragedy and trauma, this 1978 work is weirdly, uncomfortably triumphant. It’s pretty basic, structurally. Two versions of the title character – one old and nostalgic, one young and virile – weave together songs and straightforward storytelling, passing the linear, A-to-B narrative between them. We follow Bishop from Canadian military school, across the Atlantic, and into the Royal Flying Corps, where he proceeds to shoot down tens of German planes and earn himself a chestful of medals. It’s not wildly satirical like ‘Catch-22’, or brutally bleak like ‘Journey’s End’. There are occasional hints at something more sombre, but for the most part this plays out like a comic-strip story in the ‘Victor Book for Boys’ – it revels in Bishop’s wildcard derring-do, his daring night-time raids, and the rapid rattle of his machine guns. It genuinely feels like this show’s target audience might be Just William. It’s also two-and-a-quarter hours long, and with only two performers on stage, that feels like an awful long time. The songs don’t help – faintly jaunty, faintly sad, faintly colonial tunes about flying around and fighting ‘the Hun’ – and, despite the hardworking, multi-roling efforts of co-stars

Hmm, this is something of a misfire. Eve Leigh’s brand new four-hander ‘The Trick’ is clearly meant to be a playful, poignant meditation on aging, dusted with a light sprinkling of stage magic, but it fails on pretty much every level. Tonally disjointed and clunkily staged, it would be a one-starrer were it not for the geniality of its cast. Leigh’s play loosely follows Mira, an elderly widow, still haunted by the ghost of her late husband. We see her getting fleeced by two bullying builders after a stove fire. We see her getting angry at a fake fortune-teller. We see her on a hospital bed, severely undernourished after refusing to eat for days. These sobering scenes, though, are juxtaposed jarringly with bizarre interludes. An audience member getting their palm read, gameshow-style. A lengthy, long-winded story about a Jewish shoemaker resettling in America. A dance-filled discussion of magic. The whole thing is all over the place – it’s shapeless, and feels like it should’ve gone through several more draft before it reached the stage. Director Roy Alexander Weise has been hailed as something of a rising star – he won the JMK Award for young directors, and his National Theatre production of ‘Nine Night’ just closed in the West End – but this is far from his best work. His staging is sloppy and unsubtle, underusing Jemima Robinson’s glittery set, but overusing Odinn Orn Hilmarsson’s intrusive sound design. His four-strong cast supply mismatched performances, too. There’s no h

If you haven’t heard of David Ireland, you really should have. In recent years, the Belfast-based playwright has become one of British theatre's most distinctive and controversial voices with a series of scabrous, scandalising plays, including ‘Everything Between Us’, ‘The End of Hope’ and last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe conversation-starter ‘Ulster American’ (surely arriving in London soon). They’re all as dark and funny as anything by Martin McDonagh, but they have an injection of absurdity that’s entirely Ireland’s, too. A great big syringeful of it, when it comes to ‘Cyprus Avenue’, his 2016 Royal Court hit, directed by Vicky Featherstone and returning now to Sloane Square. Transferring to the larger Downstairs theatre, its shock value is perhaps slightly diluted but still pretty much the same. Over 100 minutes, the play follows Eric Miller, an outrageously bigoted, resolutely Unionist man, as he struggles with the outlandish conviction that his newborn granddaughter is in fact Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams. It goes to some pretty weird places, from an interview in a psychologist’s office, to a hallucinatory encounter with a UVF paramilitary, to a chilling climactic scene in Eric’s living room that has echoes of Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’, but it takes you with it all the way. This is largely thanks to an extraordinary central performance from Stephen Rea – all shambling shoulders, flapping hands and wriggling fingers, ornately articulate racist slurs spilling freely from his mouth.

Holly Robinson’s ‘Soft Animals’ is a very specific type of show – a two-hander exploring an ethical knot, written in elliptical, rapid-fire dialogue, and staged with sparse slickness. It’s what you might call the James Fritz school of playwriting (if you know who James Fritz is). Short, sharp, and slightly shocking.  As an example of the sub-genre, ‘Soft Animals’ is pretty good, particularly considering it’s Robinson’s debut. The two characters: a wealthy, traumatised white woman (Sarah, recently divorced), and a young black student (Frankie, evidently depressed), who share a friendship/relationship that's unlikely considering what they’ve been through and what they’re going through.  What they’ve been through (slight spoiler alert): the latter discovered the dead body of the former’s young daughter – an accidental death that doesn’t bear imagining. What they’re going through: Sarah is in denial, determinedly flaunting herself at tourist traps, hoping for some sort of public punishment, and Frankie is too, pinning her overarching depression on Sarah’s trauma. It’s staged in the round, with Lakesha Arie-Angelo directing fluidly on Anna Reid’s playpen set – a bare square, populated by squishy, colourful shapes and cuddly toys. The two actors – Ellie Piercy, mousy and slightly mischievous, and Bianca Stephens, anxious and authentically Brummie – circle round each other, sometimes like predator and prey, sometimes like dancers, sometimes like two lost souls gravitating towards on

Have you ever had a blazing row with your boyfriend, girlfriend or partner while on holiday: a trip you’ve shelled out a lot for and on which you’re meant to be having a wonderful time? There’s a very specific feeling that it evokes: a kind of inescapable, apocalyptic doom laced with frantic panic. It’s the absolute worst. ‘Cuzco’ is riddled with that feeling. A two-hander written by Spanish playwright Victor Sánchez Rodríguez and translated by William Gregory, it follows a couple (Spanish too, but they speak in English obvs) on a backpacking trip through Peru, charting the complete disintegration of their relationship on the way, argument by argument, from hostel room to hostel room.  Rodríguez and Gregory have crafted a very authentic-feeling break-up story. He’s up for a laugh. She’s decidedly not. He wants to go out and explore. She can’t be bothered. He fawns after her affection. She would rather be alone. It makes complete sense, and there’s a kind of relish in watching them tetchily quarrel. Their final fight is really quite fun. Where the play diverts slightly is in the long, heavily symbolic stories that both characters break into, and in the liberal sprinkling of Incan mythology throughout. Rodríguez is apparently trying to draw some vague parallels between Spanish imperialism and modern-day romance, between the lies told to adventure tourists and the lies that uphold relationships. It’s not clear – maybe it loses something in translation – but it makes this more t

Here’s a relatively big take: the Palladium panto isn’t really a panto. At least, not in the usual, modern sense of a family-friendly, fun-filled fairytale. The show – the prize peach in pantomime production giant QDos’ portfolio, now in its third year, and again helmed by the company’s managing director Michael Harrison – is far more in thrall to the traditions of music hall and variety shows that the Palladium is famous for. Far more concerned with spectacle and a succession of silly acts than, y’know, plot and character and that. So we get Dawn French as a dastardly supervillain. We get Charlie Stemp (off of ‘Half A Sixpence’) as a dashing prince. We get erstwhile ‘Strictly’ stalwarts Vincent Simone and Flavia Cacace doing a couple of ballroom dances, a quartet of acrobats flipping all over the shop, and seven actual dwarves running around with pickaxes (which is fine, I think). And as is now usual, we get Julian Clary spewing X-rated smut (‘D’you want some Terry’s Chocolate Orange?’ ‘I’d prefer Terry’s Chocolate Finger’ was a personal fave) in a series of increasingly outlandish costumes. Gary Wilmot is a fairly tame dame, Paul Zerdin does his ventriloquist bit, and Nigel Havers is just kind of… there. Oh, the story is ‘Snow White’ by the way, not that it really matters. Sizeable star power then, but is it actually any good? Erm, it’s definitely spectacular – we’re talking several eye-poppingly glittery sets, a giant animatronic dragon, a flying Santa’s sleigh, liberal us

Everyone hates New Year’s Eve really. The pressure to have fun is just toooo much. We’d all rather give up and spend the evening with a scented candle and a collection of nineteenth-century fairytales, right guys? Guys? Well, at least Declan Bennett agrees. That’s Declan Bennett, formerly of Point Break (Come on, Point Break! Briefly popular late ‘90s boy-band Point Break!), now a legitimately good leading man after turns in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ and ‘Once’.  He takes the main role in Noughties off-Broadway hit ‘Striking 12’ at the Union Theatre, playing a depressed office drone in NYC, too miserable to do anything on NYE but laze in his laz-e-boy, sip a lonely beer, and – after a chirpy-but-somehow-sad-inside saleswoman tries to flog him some lights and chats to him about Hans Christian Andersen – get inspired by some classic Danish fairytales.  A bit cutesy, then, and a lot contrived, but it allows creators Brendan Milburn, Valerie Vigoda and Rachel Sheinkin to sort of smash together the story of Bennett’s lonely loser with Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, in a whirlwind of folksy, bluesy tunes (think the trad vibes of Once, but a bit jauntier, a bit more syncopated). Bennett is genuinely class. Angsty and anxious and pent-up, then exploding into angsty, anxious songs. The rest of the actor-muso cast are good, too, particularly Bronté Barbé, doubling up as saleswoman and Little Match Girl. Oliver Kaderbhai’s production is pleasingly swift, apart from some faffing around

Sophie Steer must have calves of steel. She must have quads of pure granite. Because for almost all of ‘Lands’, the 90-minute long hit fringe show from Bush Theatre associate artists Antler, she’s bouncing up and down on a mini trampoline (a trampette, as Google has just told me). And she can’t get off. Leah Brotherhead, on the other hand, must have the patience of a saint. Because for a great big chunk of ‘Lands’, she’s piecing together a thousand-piece jigsaw. When she’s not trying to persuade Sophie to get off the trampette, that is. What’s the point of this? Well, a) it’s kind of cool and b) it serves as a surprisingly apt metaphor. A metaphor for what is not exactly clear – possibly addiction, possibly depression, definitely obsessive, compulsive behaviour of some sort – but that doesn’t really matter. Because Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s show isn’t about mental health per se, it’s about how we deal with friends who are suffering. As, with increasing exasperation, Leah attempts to get Sophie to stop bouncing (running at her, counting her down, even slapping her in one lengthy, wince-worthy section), the show slowly emerges as a compelling examination of how to help someone who can’t help themselves. Of how easy it is to hurt one another. Of how its just impossible to understand each other sometimes. It’s really funny in parts, stuffed full of quirky humour, but it’s also mightily moving too, thanks largely to its superb cast of two. Brotherhead is remarkable, a smile or a grim

Well this is weird. Chris Goode, who is a bit of a big dog in the world of radical fringe theatre, has returned with his first solo show since 2014, ‘Mirabel’ and I have absolutely no idea what to make of it. If I had to put a label on it, I’d call it a surrealist, post-apocalyptic fairytale-slash-allegory, but even that really doesn’t encapsulate the sheer oddity, scope, and emotion of it.The show is like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, both literally and metaphorically. Goode, dressed in a leather trench coat and blindfold like an extra from Max Max, slowly relates the story of the eponymous eight-year-old girl, who wakes up after the apocalypse to a world where everything is in ruins and pretty much everyone else is dead. Apart from, that is, her teddy bear, a red-eyed dog, a raffish airplane pilot, an anthropomorphic rock, and a flower called Salad, with whom she goes off across the wastelands in search of proper adult help.Goode’s writing is kind of unfocussed, but it writhes with poetry and imagery and energy, and he delivers this doomsday fable with real tenderness, real softness. Naomi Dawson’s design is nifty too: as the story unfolds, Goode steps back through upright layers of translucent fabric, Lee Curran’s lighting illuminating twisted shopping carts and other apocalyptic debris as he goes. Matt Padden’s deafening sound design of crumbling earthquakes and shrieking metal is slickly used as well. It’s all very cool. The only thing is I HAVE ZERO CLUE