Ham is a Fringe show that is a take-off on Hamlet , but here the central issue is Hamlet’s decision to be vegan while his mother, Gertrude, continues to enjoy her sausages. This situation is explained to us by the show’s co-creators, Mary Higgins, apparently a real-life vegan who plays Hamlet, and Ell Potter, seemingly a real-life carnivore who plays Gertrude. The production is structured around the five acts of Hamlet , taking dialogue from Shakespeare and re-contextualising it around the new premise. The two cast members manage to draw considerable humour from this exercise, but by the time we reach the play-within-a-play, there may simply be too many levels of reality for the audience to process. We have Mary and Ell as characters putting on a version of Hamlet that now contains another play, and matters become even more mind-boggling when that play, with its bizarre sexual domination premise, turns into an audience participation exercise. It all begins to feel rather awkward and ...

The premise is wonderfully simple. When four guests descend on the Bliss family for a quiet weekend in the country, things turn out to be considerably less than blissful. Judith, who has retired from the theatre, is finding the pleasures of rustic life no substitute for the satisfactions of the stage. She has invited down a young man who can provide the adulation she once enjoyed in her career. At the same time, her novelist husband David has asked a young woman to join them, hoping she might provide him with a model for the flapper in his latest novel. Add to this ménage their children’s invitations to two apparently unsuitable suitors and you have the makings of one of Noël Coward’s most successful farces. The hapless guests find themselves trapped in a family whose artistic members constantly turn their reality into a performance, with all the histrionics and artifice that entails. Coward is satirising not only the conventions of the theatre, with its exaggeration and falsification ...

The alcohol-fuelled mind games that take place in Edward Albee’s masterpiece can be read on many levels. There is a definite biographical link to Albee’s adoptive mother and father, as well as a political parable with the names George and Martha being shared by the parents of the American experiment. In fact, the failure of both marriages to produce children may foreshadow the current erosion of the ideals espoused by the nation’s founders. The most common reading, however, concerns the corrosive power of illusion and the devastating pain of truth. All George and Martha’s games weaponise both, exposing the darkness of the human condition while suggesting that a cruel, desperate need for love is its only antidote. While it is difficult not to compare this production with the film version, in which all four principal actors were nominated for Academy Awards, the current cast holds its own in such illustrious company. Josh Dylan is suitably cocksure as Nick, the ambitious biology professo...

In 1849, Thomas Carlyle dismissed political economy as the “dismal science”. James Graham’s new play about John Maynard Keynes would seem to prove him spectacularly wrong. Part biography, part intellectual sparring match, it examines one of the twentieth century’s most influential economists and, in doing so, reveals a man as full of apparent contradictions as the economic theories that made him famous. A member of the Bloomsbury group, Keynes moved among writers, artists and intellectuals such as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. However, he seemed slightly out of place in this unconventional milieu, as he also worked at the Treasury and frequented the meeting rooms of Westminster. Bohemian and bureaucrat in equal proportions. His private life was no less contradictory: while methodically recording his same-sex encounters with the obsessiveness of a stamp collector, he later married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, an unlikely union that proved remarkab...

Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan had an extraordinary life. Descended from the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, born in Moscow and raised in Paris, she fled to Britain with her family in 1940 after the fall of France. She joined the WAAF before being recruited by the Special Operations Executive and, in June 1943, was sent to occupied France by Lysander aircraft as a wireless operator. The life expectancy for wireless operators working in occupied France was said to be just six weeks, yet Khan continued operating in Paris for several months after the rest of her network had been rounded up. This is a life full of drama, but the challenge for any biographical play is to shape that material into a story with a clear point and a strong arc of development. The facts may all be fascinating, but the playwright must decide which to include, which to leave out and how much dramatic licence to take with the characters in order to make the story work. Unfortunately, A Small and Quiet Light sticks too clos...

Arthur Hull’s Fringe show runs just over an hour and begins with an enticing concept: a selection of great songs from unsuccessful shows. Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along certainly fits the bill, although its reputation has been transformed and it is now widely admired as one of his finest shows. Other choices, however, stretch the definition of a flop. Cats was hardly a commercial failure, while Babes in Arms , which introduced “My Funny Valentine”, ran for 289 Broadway performances, definitely a success by 1930s standards. King Kong, Moby Dick and Carrie more clearly meet the brief, but none produces the promised undiscovered masterpiece. Instead, the concept increasingly feels less like great songs from bad shows and more like bad songs from bad shows. There is nevertheless plenty of fun to be squeezed from these questionable choices, and Hull proves an engaging performer. The problem comes when the jokes and satire give way to supposedly serious moments. The shift in tone is aw...

Table 17 is a charming little romcom about Jada and Dallas, who meet again after a failed engagement. What will Jada wear for the occasion? Is it a date or not a date? Will they get back together, or have they moved on? The humour is touching and will ring true with anyone who has ever experienced a failed relationship, although the story itself has a somewhat predictable feel. Martha Wallace as Jada and Jamel Westman as Dallas create thoroughly convincing and completely likeable characters. His faux cool and her needy strength generate plenty of laughter, but it is Michael Rishaw who almost steals the show in his turns as the camp, wisecracking maître d’, River, and Jada’s sport-obsessed co-worker and suitor, Eric. His transformations produce amazingly accurate and instantly recognisable types. He also serves as the narrator of this slight story, delivering its moral: “Maybe the lesson isn’t in the outcome, but in the effort. We all deserve such effort.” It is an understated plea for...

Sting’s The Last Ship draws on his experience of growing up in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear, as the shipbuilding industry that shaped the community went into decline. Dominating the stage is an enormous ship, freighted with the hopes and dreams of a community dwarfed by political and economic forces beyond its control. The last ship becomes both a symbol of the dying yard and a vessel for the community’s aspirations in the face of the harsh reality that their livelihoods and way of life are about to disappear. It also becomes an image of the human condition and the inevitability of death, as Sting plays the ailing foreman Jackie White, awaiting Charon, the mythic ferryman played by Shaggy, to take him across to the other side. Against this grim backdrop unfolds the story of Meg and Gideon, whose relationship was ruptured seventeen years earlier when he went to sea, unknowingly leaving her pregnant and exposed to the judgement of a critical community. One of the great strengths of the show ...

In Leipzig in 1930, Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was disrupted by Nazi supporters protesting against what they regarded as politically and morally offensive material. Unsurprisingly, Brecht is frequently referenced in Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists and, like Brecht’s work, Tiago Rodrigues’ drama proves to be both intelligent and incendiary. The play’s central premise is that a Portuguese family has created a rite of passage in memory of a woman who was murdered by Fascists. On turning 26, members of the family are expected to kill a selected fascist. The family members all take the name Catarina in memory of the murdered woman, and now it is the turn of one of the great-granddaughters of the family matriarch to carry out the ritual killing. When she hesitates to follow the family tradition, what ensues is a multi-layered exploration of resistance to authoritarianism and the morality of killing in the name of political resistance. The dense ...

With this production, Tilda Swinton returns to the Royal Court Theatre in a role she originally played there at the age of 26 in 1988. Manfred Karge's Jacke wie Hose is a complex allegorical drama about the necessity for the underclass to constantly transform itself simply to survive the shifting social and political storm of German history, from the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The shape-shifting and gender-bending demanded of its protagonist by the sweep of events are brilliantly mirrored in Swinton's performance. Yet Ella's poignant longing for a feminine, fairy-tale existence is somewhat eclipsed by the sheer success of Swinton's transformation from Ella to Max. The young girl who dreams of being Snow White, waiting to be awakened by a prince's kiss, never feels quite as present as the extraordinary figure Swinton creates as Max. The duality of Ella's desires, to believe in the fairy tale while finding a way to survive in a hostile world,...