Everybody's Talking About Jamie

by Dan Gillespie Sells (music) and Tom MacRae (lyrics)

seen by live streaming from the Apollo Theatre on 5 July 2018

A snazzy musical directed by Jonathan Butterell sees 16-year-old Sheffield schoolboy Jamie New (a wonderfully versatile John McCrea) having dreams of attending his Year 11 school prom in a dress. (The play is inspired by a TV documentary on the same subject). His mother Margaret (Josie Walker) supports him, but is also in peril of living out her own dreams through her son and compensating for her own disappointments - including a disastrous  and short-lived marriage to Janie's father. His closest schoolfriend Pritti Pasha (Lucie Shorthouse) is also supportive, if at times baffled, and really all that clouds his prospects are his own insecurities, his father's disgust, one school bully (Luke Baker) and the ambivalent school teacher Miss Hedge (Tamsin Carroll).

The Plough and the Stars

by Sean O'Casey

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 25 August 2016

Jeremy Herrin and Howard Davies have co-directed this revival of Sean O'Casey's play set in 1915 and 1916, marking the centenary of the Easter Rising in Dublin. The set, designed by Vicki Mortimer, shows us a crumbling tenement in Dublin - first the Clitheroe's flat, then a nearby pub, then the outside of the tenement, and finally the attic flat. A clever use of the revolve reveals the general seediness of the area, and, later, the dangers arising from the street fighting of the uprising.