Recently in Theatre Category

Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitmore dates from 1986, but I'd only previously seen the 1996 TV adaptation starring Derek Jacobi which was very good.

So when I learnt the other week that there was a new production in London I thought I should go and see it, as Alan Turing is a fascinating man who had a tragic end to his life. He was instrumental in decrypting the Enigma code during WWII, and went on to be an early pioneer in computing in Manchester University. And yet, because he was gay, he was prosecuted and ended up committing suicide having been forced to take drugs to "cure" him (Of course Gordon Brown recently apologised to him and others who suffered this humiliation).

Whitmore's play covers all of this to some extent or another, and he personalises it of course, with the inclusion of the man who he fell out with and ended up being prosecuted over, his mother and a great female friend that he had in Bletchley.

The relatively young cast in this production were very good, and what was especially interesting was its location - in Kew Steam Museum. It certainly added a certain air to procedings. A good evening - and it finishes tonight!

After I recently saw The Power of Yes, it became apparent that this was not the first production that David Hare had produced in this way.

In 2004, there was The Permanent Way, a National Theatre/Out of Joint co-production that carried out a similar dramatised investigation into the state of British railways following privatisation and through a spate of accidents that seemed to occur partly as a bi-product of that.

Obviously, you can't just watch plays "on-demand" unless they're one of the few that make it to DVD release. For the most part, you can only hope that the script has been published - and all of David Hare's have been by Faber and Faber, including The Permanent Way.

But I knew it was also broadcast on Radio 3, so I hunted through my old recordings (I record far more than I can hear), and what do you know - I had an mp3 copy of it!

What a fabulous play it was. I listened to it yesterday - mostly on a train as it happens as I returned from Oxford. It's another devastating indictment of mistakes both avoidable and unavoidable. And John Prescott really doesn't come out of it very well at all.

What a shame that plays like this aren't available to download at sites like iTunes? Despite being dramatised for radio by an independent production company, Catherine Bailey Limited. Searches of Amazon, iTunes and Audible don't find it. While the play may have limited life expectancy as a CD, digitising audio and then selling it on iTunes should be straightforward shouldn't it? Surely it'd unlock loads of additional revenue for the independent producers concerned?

In the meantime, my Psion Wavefinder recording dutifully kept from its 2004 broadcast will have to do me...

David Hare is an angry playwright, and rightly so.

The Power of Yes is his attempt to make sense of the financial crisis, and rather than a conventional piece, we see the "author" (Anthony Calf) attempt to make sense of everything by conducting a series of interviews with relevant people. Many of them are named, but others are anonymous. It's fun watching recognisable characters being dramatised - most famously George Soros (Bruce Myers).

Most usefully to our guiding author is Masa Serdarevic (Jemima Roper), now an FT journalist but previously at Lehman Brothers. And of course, as she guides Hare through proceedings, she helps us along too.

The nature of the piece means that it's largely expository and there's little room for characterisation. That's even more the case since there are dozens of characters here who come in and out so often, we have to literally be introduced and then reintroduced to them.

But this simply isn't a straightforward story. Hare's doing his best to get to the bottom of it, and to a large extent he does. I'd guess that the chap in the row in front of me works or worked at one of the US banks in question because he was nodding furiously at one point, and roared with laughter at the revelation that Lehman Brothers workers weren't carrying their cleared desks in boxes as they left after the company had gone under. Instead it turned out that the cafeteria worked on a credit system, and they were clearing out their credit in confectionery.

The staging was minimalist but made clever use of screens and projections. Even a blackboard was wheeled out on a few occasions: we really were back in school at times.

Overall, I thought that this was a terrific and incredibly timely piece. Although the BBC recently dramatised The Last Days of the Lehman Brothers, this was somehow more accessible, but not simplified for the hard of thinking. Hare persuasively argues anyway that managing a hospital is actually a lot harder than some of the jobs that these bankers were - and are - doing.

I've got to say that I'm not sure that the rest of the audience quite shared my enjoyment of this piece. Whether or not it was because most of them will have probably bought these tickets a long time before they found out what exactly they were letting themselves in for, I don't know. Perhaps they were restless at having to sit through two hours without an interval. I think that was a correct decision since you really didn't want to have to break up the story.

Anyway, ignore them and either see this, or read the script which Faber already has on sale. Although I didn't pick up a copy after the performance, such is the level of information imparted by the script, it may well be worth reading.

And I hope that as some point this gets an outing on TV or gets a DVD release. It's the sort of thing that will benefit from re-watching.

I first saw Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in 1993 at the Theatre Royal Bath, when the play was touring following its premiere at the National Theatre in London. It was a joy to watch and I instantly fell in love with it. I rushed out to buy the text.

It was smart, and literate. The dialogue was sumptuous. The performances were wonderful. That original production starred Rufus Sewell as Septimus, tutor to Emma Fielding's Thomasina in Sidley Park, the English country house where all the action occurs.

Thomasina is a child prodigy, with an uncanny grasp of mathematics. Septimus struggles to keep up as taunts and tantalises the various females in the house - at least those not being tantalised by his off-stage friend, Lord Byron.

Meanwhile in the present day Felicity Kendall's Hannah Jarvis is having a war of wits with Bill Nighy's fame seeking academic, Bernard Nightingale. Events are separated by about two hundred years, and yet are, of course completely linked.

Radio 3 broadcast an audio version of this original production later that same year. I dutifully recorded onto a pair of very hissy cassette tapes. Sadly, this version has never been released commercially, although if you hunt very very hard, you might just find it on the web.

In 2007, Radio 4 broadcast a new version of the play as part of a BBC Radio Stoppard season, with Jason Watkins as Bernard, Nicola Redmond as Hannah and Jack Laskey as Septimus. I'd love to be able to tell you that this version is available for purchase/download... But it's not.

And now comes the first big revival of Arcadia in London since its original production. And it's also the first live production I've seen since the NT's production that I saw back in 1993.

The play has lost absolutely nothing in the intervening years, and is now studied regularly at A Level (I got to study The Pardoner's Tale and Julius Caesar for my O Level Eng Lit. The former was barely in a form of English that I understood, and the latter only just. Students these days get to study much better stuff.).

This new production stars Dan Stevens as Septimus, Jessie Cave as Thomasina, Samantha Bond as Hannah Jarvis, and Neil Pearson as Bernard Nightingale.

At first it's hard to shake off my recollection of the original casting - especially so with Bill Nighy. And Neil Pearson seems to display some of the larger-than-life attributes that Nighy had formerly brought to the role. But you soon settle down into the run of things. Pearson and Bond play off one another fantastically, and Stevens, like Sewell before him, is very rakish.

Teenage prodigies are surely hard to play - they're mostly unlikeable in real life after all, but Cave does so well. Lucy Griffith as Chloe Coverly is very different to when I last saw her as Maid Marion in the recent TV version of Robin Hood - she still sends me weak at the knees though.

Tom Stoppard's son Ed plays the thoughtful Coverly, and brings tremendous charm to the role.

The single set does the job well, and the music is minimal but nicely placed.

Overall, this new production is absolutely wonderful, and I can't recommend it highly enough. The jokes are terrific from start to finish, and it's just such a thoroughly thoughtful play.

Boeing Boeing is a new production of a French farce dating from the sixties (and filmed a couple of times). Bernard (Roger Allam) lives in a Parisian apartment, and at the play's start we meet him with glamourous TWA air stewardess Gloria (Tamsin Outhwaite). But he has a secret. Aided and abetted by his world weary maid (Frances de la Tour) he is also betrothed to Gretchen of Luthansa (Michelle Gomez) and Gabriella of Alitalia (Daisy Beaumont). And as in the best of farces, circumstances come together when Bernard's old friend from the provinces Robert (Mark Rylance) arrives in town for a few days.

Rylance gives Robert a Welsh accent to accentuate his naivety - he hails from Aix-en-Provence - and his character soon finds himself close to a nervous breakdown but at the same time excited as the doors duly slam all around him.

The standout performance, however, has to be Michelle Gomez's Gretchen who has the most ridiculously over the top accent since Allo Allo, but she's fantastic at the same time.

Overall, this is thoroughly stupid fare, but an entertaining way to pass a Saturday evening - especially if you've just seen England lose dismally in Ireland on TV.

To the Red Rose Comedy Club to see Alex Horne perfom When In Rome, an attempt to get more of us speaking Latin. Of course, I passed my O Level in Latin many moons ago (Grade C), so this wasn't strictly necessary for me, but I went along.

We got there early to get some food and sat right at the front. This was obviously going to be a slideshow/Powerpoint led piece so there'd be no danger sitting right up front would there? OK, OK. If you sit in the front row at a comedy show, you've got a good idea of what's coming.

The show's in two halves with the first being largely straightforward stand-up. There's very little Latin. And, yes, we got picked on (for having popped out for some ice-cream from the corner shop across the way for dessert). During the interval, Alex's personal assistant, Tim, handed out Latin exams for us to complete. If I'm not mistaken, these were hot off a hidden laser printer and incorporated the name of a fellow front-row sittee. But mainly these were to gather names to incorporate into the second half of the show. Considering that this was to be Powerpoint based, there was no real reason for them to need to spend most of the interval tinkering with the "presentation".

Actually, I've got to say that I was very impressed with what they did with it. The show was constructed along the lines of a Fighting Fantasy Book. At each point you could make a choice - the audience had been divided into boys and girls (or puella and puellae). Xavier got chosen and boys' team captain, and was given a headband to wear.

The finale involved a Latin tug of war. I helped the boys win with a late "Quod Erat Demonstratum" and "Et tu Brute" (really!). I can't give away the ending.

Very good fun. And worth catching at the Soho Theatre in a week or so's time, as the tour concludes.

Last week, just after (re-)opening night, I got to see Christian Slater reprise his role in the stage adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. To many people, it's hard to get beyond Jack Nicholson's screen version of it from 1978. That's not such a great problem for me, as it's simply many years since I've seen the film version, and I've never been a colossal Nicholson fan.

I'd previously seen a production of the play version of Kesey's novel at the Theatre Royal Bath back at the end of the eighties (try as I might, I can't find any details on the web, which is a shame since I can't remember who played lead character McMurphy).

In this production, McMurphy's played by Slater who seems to revel in the role, while the evil Nurse Ratched is played by Alex Kingston. This was a better staging of the play than the Bath version, with the simple set dominated by the glass booth from where drugs are dispensed and Ratched controls procedings via a microphone.

Some of my companions were disappointed by Kingston's portayal of Ratched, since she's altogether more attractive than she was in the film, and wears bright scarlet lipstick. But this is completely right as far as I was concerned since her sexless life revolves around dominating these troubled men. She enjoys the power that she has. Her pressed crinoline uniform and bright lipstick are well placed.

Overall, it's an entertaining evening at the theatre. As always there's a slight issue with the mainly British cast all adopting American accents with varying degrees of believability, but overall it works well.

So where do we begin with Ducktastic? It's a new play written by the guys who wrote The Play What I Wrote about Morecombe and Wise. It revolves around someone who was previously "the biggest breakfast time magician on the Vegas strip" and who performs magic with a duck flavour (not in the Chinese "duck" sense, since the birds at this performance are, for the most part, alive).

Incorporated into the play are audience participation moments that actually scared me stupid since my free ticket, courtesy of some rubber ducks found floating in a fountain in Leicester Square on Monday morning, saw me seated in the front row.

We then end up in a world of stage magic and a duck called Daphne who might actually be able to do real magic. There's a romance blossoming between a theatre late-comer and one of the ushers.

There are puns aplenty, and corny jokes that make you wince rather than laugh.

And there are songs - they finish on the big glitzy number "Duck Knows".

All in all it makes for one of the strangest evenings in the West End I've ever had. They're still in preview, so with luck some of the jokes can be tied down a bit more, since they don't "hit" quite as much as they might, but I'm not complaining that much.

It's ages since I last went to the theatre, and that would have almost certainly been a freebie from my friend Simon who works for a theatre marketing company.

Yesterday, I read an interview with Richard Griffith in The Observer. He's in a new play called Heroes, a translation by Tom Stoppard of a French play originally called The Wind in the Poplars by Gerald Sibleyras. So being nearby at lunchtime I went in and bought a ticket, thinking that they might be cheap while this production is in preview. They aren't.

But don't let the ticket prices put you off, as this is a wonderful play. It's funny that it's on at the Wyndhams Theatre, home until relatively recently of another three piece, Art. The three players this time are three ex-WWI servicemen in a retirement home played by Ken Stott, Richard Griffith and John Hurt. There, they live a life full of nothing as they each have their own neuroses - real or imagined - to battle with. Slowly, they put together a plan to escape their presumed misery.

To say much more would be a shame, but given the calibre of the man who translated the work, expect some sparkling dialogue. Oh, and there's also a dog.

Incidentally, should you want to save yourself a few pennies when you see this play, you might consider reading this article published in today's Telegraph, an extract of which makes up the bulk of the programme. Now I know that theatre programmes are never exactly value for money, but just reprinting a newspaper interview is a little poor.

On my way home, I had the delightful pleasure to share a train carriage, for a short distance, with someone who'd make Waynetta Slob look like someone you'd want to take home to meet your mum. Now Richard Griffith is a big fellow. A very big fellow. She was bigger. Now I'm not being sizeist, but when a fellow passenger asked to sit down where she had her bag, she gave him a dirty look and let him know that a friend was getting on at the next stop. He ignored this and sat down.

I got off at the next stop, but I saw her colleague get on and feared for the life of the chap who was sitting with them in the four-seat grouping. There simply wasn't going to be room for all three of them. Incidentally the two larger people both worked for the rail company. Obviously the company in question doesn't have a corporate gym membership.