Here's a good pub quiz question: after Shakespeare, who was the most performed playwright in America last year? Arthur Miller? Tennessee Williams? David Mamet? None of those.
"I’m not a number, I’m not a grade, and I’m not a failure." The 17-year-old girl stands in front of the small class, who gaze at her goggle-eyed. "A robot factory. That’s all you’ve got here." The teacher’s response is caustically admiring. "Why are you here, Alisha, if that’s what you’re capable of? Why didn’t you do that last year?" This is the school - not so much of hard knocks as of tough skins – for those who have been treated badly by the world, and have a strong suspicion that things won’t get much better.
Transatlantic theatrical traffic is busier than ever, and now here at the Hampstead is not just Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play, first seen in 2015, but director Joe Mantello and his full Broadway cast.
We are now pretty familiar with the idea that human reproduction (making babies) has been turned into big business, and there have already been several good recent plays about desperate couples and surrogacy – Vivienne Franzmann’s Bodies and Satinder Chohan’s Made in India – so is there any more to be said about giving nature a helping hand? This Hampstead Theatre certainly thinks so.
Regular air travel is a hassle. All that queuing, all that security, all those hot halls, and then the endless waiting, the bawling kids and the limited legroom. Basically air travel sucks. But at least it’s reasonably safe. The same cannot be said for irregular air travel: stowaways who slip into the wheel wells of planes. Some 96 people have tried this way of avoiding border checks – and most have died. This new play by Fiona Doyle, who won the playwriting Papatango Prize in 2014, was inspired by one such case, that of Jose Matada, who died in 2012.
Five years ago, when New York playwright Rajiv Joseph started on his fantasy disquisition on truth, lies and the recent history of Russia, no one was talking about a new Cold War and trump was still a thing you did in a game of cards. Now, at the British premiere of Describe the Night, a wall in the foyer is beaming an image of Vladimir Putin and a pronouncement he made earlier that day.
It's long been a theatrical given, especially in musicals, that characters need to be seen to change: a climactic duo in the eternally crowd-pulling Wicked makes that abundantly clear. ("Because I knew you," goes the lyric, "I have been changed for good.") But what happens when people can't or won't change, and are so ground down by circumstance and their own temperament that they retreat inwards until they implode?
Sometimes it pays to come in under the radar.
Year-end wrap-ups function as both remembrances of things past and time capsules, attempts to preserve an experience to which audiences, for the most part, have said farewell.
The play that famously got away when one of its stars (quite literally) jumped ship is back. In 1995, Stephen Fry abandoned the West End premiere of Simon Gray's espionage drama Cell Mates, leaving co-star Rik Mayall in the lurch and prompting Gray to write a particularly dyspeptic account of the bizarre goings-on called Fat Chance.