The House of Shadows (Almeida, London)
Valuation: 
Verdict: Not ending enough night
The Break (Hampstead Theatre, London)
Valuation:
Conclusion: more of it
Fat (Dominion Theatre, London)
Valuation: 
Conclusion: Needs more oil
A character in The House Of Shades starring Anne-Marie Duff at the Almeida Theater in Islington has an interesting question. Given that we’re all stuck on a rock and racing toward extinction, how come we don’t all cling to it and scream?
I would have thought this would be a good question for playwright Beth Steel to answer. Unfortunately no luck. She prefers to shoot a misery marathon that sticks screaming to the stage for almost three hours.
Her heroine, Constance (Duff), has lived in a Nottingham tenement for five decades and is a tight-lipped mam who grumbles through her seven years of life, even to the finish line in the hospital.
Anne-Marie Duff stars in The House of Shades at the Almeida
From 1965 she celebrates the death of her violent father; and later blames her perfectly harmless husband Alistair (Stuart McQuarrie) for her failures in life.
But her most disturbing act is killing one of her teenage daughters and her baby while she performs an abortion with a clothes hanger on stage. Amazingly, we’re apparently supposed to sympathize with Constance because she’s a frustrated crooner who was once dumped by a creepy MC with a seedy wig.
Although we are told at great length – and at length – about how miserable life is for everyone in this family, there is no point in anything that makes life worth living. . . beyond pot meat and a cup of coffee.
McQuarrie’s poor old father is written as a colorless git who curiously enjoys the two best scenes: meeting his hero Nye Bevan’s ghost on his allotment; and after shedding this mortal coil, he is visited by his son Jack in the morgue.
THE BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE
STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY
Ralph Fiennes leads the cast in David Hare’s play about mad New York city planner Robert Moses, streaming live from the Bridge Theater on Thursday — straightlinecrazy.ntlive.com. Also, watch out for Danny Webb as Governor Al Smith.
straightlinecrazy.ntlive.com
As Jack, who transforms Tory just to defy his shop steward father, Michael Grady-Hall is a cleaver-faced loner. At least Kelly Gough, as his twin sister Agnes, is allowed to scream with anger, in keeping with the author’s existential terror.
That leaves Beatie Edney for the best: a sour curtain twitch between scenes over the years.
Blanche McIntyre’s production is otherwise a dull dirge – save for an appalling Grand Guignol of gyno blood after the break. Count yourself lucky to make it out alive.
The misery continues in Hampstead with Naomi Wallace’s play The Breach. This is about a 12-year-old boy in 1970’s Kentucky who arranges for his sexually precocious older sister to be drugged and molested as a show of loyalty to a group of friends.
Had we been able to sympathize with the characters, it might have helped us to embark on this terrifying idea. But instead, the play feels like a live-action episode of the South Park animated TV series — minus all the fun.
Little brother Acton (Stanley Morgan) is little more than a mentally prone asthmatic; and his friends Hoke and Frayne (Alfie Jones and Charlie Beck) are a pair of deluded sexual obsessives who are completely overwhelmed.
Most notable is Shannon Tarbet as big sister Jude, who startles her brother’s friends with her sexual outspokenness.
But Sarah Frankcom’s production is as emotionally inert as the basement set is lifeless.
Ominously, the play was conceived as the first part of a trilogy. Too many subsidized theaters seem to have seriously lost touch with audiences. They could all benefit from a cold blast of commercial reality.
Creaky Old Favorite is a two room game
Written by Lou Wakefield and Carole Hayman, Ladies Of Letters began as books which they adapted into 15-minute episodes of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, where the popular series ran from 1997-2010. She later had a brief airing on television. And now, to complete the set, it has been adapted for the stage by Jonathan Harvey (whose resume includes Beautiful Thing for the stage and Gimme Gimme Gimme for TV).
Gwyneth Strong and Tessa Peake-Jones are working together for the first time since the 1980s sitcom Only Fools And Horses
It tells the story of middle-aged “enemies”, Irene (Tessa Peake-Jones) and Vera (Gwyneth Strong), who begin a correspondence after a tipsy meeting at Irene’s daughter’s wedding. Their letters – written while they sit at their desks ironing or feeding their pets Francis O’Connor’s cleverly divided set – begin quite innocently as they describe their mundane lives.
But soon the one-upmanship begins – with children, travel and personal taste. “There’s nothing wrong with having Ann Widdecombe as your style icon,” Vera writes to Irene, who later objects, “The best thing about your living room is that you can see out of it.”
The story grows more bizarre as political protests, a concussion, a drug bust, and incarceration ensue. But despite this seemingly action-packed list, there’s little drama – as there’s no direct interaction between the two women on stage.
Mr Harvey has updated the material to include references to Strictly Come Dancing and Brexit, but Ladies Of Letters still feels dated. Miss Strong and Miss Peake-Jones, working together for the first time since the 1980s sitcom Only Fools And Horses, are compelling, but Joanna Read’s production fails to push the boundaries of the material’s provenance, and the evening — a little less than two Hours – feels rather longer.
Tour until July 2nd. See Yvonne Arnaud. co.uk/touring
VERONICA LEE
This fat is not what I want
Grease, in case it slipped your way, is the story of the dangerous Danny who brings out the bad girl in the tightly laced Sandy. It began as a stage musical in 1971 and was, to use one of its own phrases, a rattling “hunk o’ junk”.
The 1978 film, loosely based on the original book by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey and featuring the gems in a gold score, was a pure greased flash, culminating in You Are The One I Want , with Sandy rebooted as Danny’s fantasy femme fatale, hot, trotting in spray-on black spandex.
Peter Andre has a small role as a squeaky DJ; then he grows pink wings and puts on his dancing shoes to play a camp angel
When news goes to your own daughters, it takes a snake hipster with John Travolta’s cheeky charm and a bucket of Brylcreem to make him jump. Everything is missing in Nikolai Foster’s gritty revival of the city, which returns to the original sketchy plot in which unknown characters appear, do their thing and never become part of the story. Roger (Noah Harrison) briefly rocks Mooning (in both senses); Jake Reynolds’ adorable Doody claims to be a guitar newbie and gets everyone grooving with “Theen Magic Changes”; Katie Lee’s Cha Cha dances like a storm.
But the nice Dan Partridge struggles to convince as Danny, the proud king of cool; and there’s little spark between him and the sweetly floating Olivia Moore, a dead maid of honor for the Duchess of Cambridge, and more convincing as candy Sandy than horny Sandy.
As Kenickie, leader of the Burger House Boys, Paul French overdoes the brutality. Jocasta Almgill’s Rizzo brings the house down with her angry, passionate “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” but she’s just too angry.
Pocket rocket Peter Andre has a small role as a squeaky DJ; he then grows pink wings and puts on his dancing shoes to play a camp angel who encourages Frenchy, who dropped out of beauty school, to go back to high school. Cute, but he swallows the lyrics.
Even the dresses and the rock ‘n’ roll couldn’t knock me out of my seat. I remain hopelessly devoted, but this isn’t the nostalgia fest I want.
GEORGINA BROWN