Reviews by Alan Franks

This early Rattigan play has had an interesting life. Set in the Second World War and premiered while that conflict still raged, it has since found itself rather upstaged by the author’s later and less comedic hits such as The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version. Fitting that it should have made its reappearance at the Orange Tree in Kew Road since his first major play, First Episode, was staged at the adventurous, now long defunct, Q Theatre, just a mile up the road. Appropriate too that … [Read more...]

Lazily, the 1970s have been portrayed as a sort of hangover decade after the vividness of The Sixties; quaint old hippie tendencies having to shove over and make room for proper adult pursuits like careers and parenthood. The Good Life, the sitcom which ran on BBC1 for three years from 1975, rather muddied that simplistic picture, and a good job too. This stage version, based on the highly popular TV series, serves as a reminder that Tom and Barbara, the couple originally played by … [Read more...]

Four Edgar Allan Poe stories on the trot. This is nothing if not a macabrathon. It’s not just any old Poe either, but matter from the darkest reaches of an output never over-troubled by sunlight. To stage such a show requires an appetite for horror almost as voracious as that of the tormented but prolific American author who died in 1849 at the age of forty. This is amply supplied by the young performer and director of One Man Poe, Stephen Smith. From early childhood, he says, he has been … [Read more...]

It’s nearly a quarter of a century ago that the playwright Shelagh Stephenson scored an enduring hit with this early play at Hampstead. Round the world it went, justly praised for its portrayal of siblings struggling with each other and themselves in the wake of their mother’s death. With hurtful legacies at the heart of their gathering, memory itself justified its place in the title and became a virtual, controversial character in its own right. This it still does in a witty, unsparing … [Read more...]

It’s one of the strangest nights out at the theatre. You’re met at a railway station in the far east of London by a group of ushers who load you into a plush coach and spirit you out into the rear end of beyond. If you’ve never come this way before, you’re in good company, for you now enter Thamesmead Waterfront, one of the capital’s last redoubts of true wilderness. A chain of roundabouts takes you up towards the crook of the Thames and the peninsular land to the east of Woolwich Arsenal. … [Read more...]

With its climate of chaos and misrule, it’s an apt choice of play for our times. Comedy it may be but, as with much of Shakespeare’s work in this mode, darkness and terror are everywhere. It would be strange if this were not the case here, since 1603, when it was premiered, found London struggling under the tyranny of the plague and losing some 30,000 of its citizens to it in the course of the year. In such a context, the play’s subtitle, What You Will, comes into its own. Given the binge … [Read more...]

Everything is coming to an end round here: the summer season, the tea-room’s trade, youth itself, the whole country. For this is the tiny village of Kilnsea, set so far out on England’s north-east coast that the great sea-port of Hull is twenty-five miles away and comes over as a remote western presence. The buses don’t get out this far anymore. The playwright Tom Wells knows just what, or rather where, he is talking about, having grown up in Kilnsea, and his play is awash with the … [Read more...]