All My Sons

by Arthur Miller

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 14 May 2019

Jeremy Herrin directs Bill Pullman as Joe Keller, Sally Field as his wife Kate, Colin Morgan as his son Chris and Jenna Coleman as Ann Deever, the daughter of Joe's disgraced foreman Steve and prospective wife of Chris in a Headlong co-production with the Old Vic of Arthur Miller's 1947 play about the corrosive effect of capitalism on small-town lives.

Joe, Kate and Chris live still in the suburban house where Chris and his brother Larry (now missing in action from the war, presumed dead by all except Kate) grew up. Ann and her mother and brother George (Oliver Johnstone) left the neighbouring house after Steve was convicted for sending faulty cylinders to the Air Force during the war, which caused the deaths of at least 21 pilots. Joe himself spent some time on jail, but was exonerated and released when the court accepted testimony that he was not involved in the deception.

Imperium

Adapted by Mike Poulton from the Cicero novels of Robert Harris

seen at the Gielgud Theatre on 4 July 2018

Gregory Doran directs Richard McCabe as Cicero and Joseph Kloska as his secretary Tiro, with a supporting cast of twenty-three, in a two part adaptation of Robert Hrris's three Cicero novels (Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator) though most of the material from the first novel has not been used. The two stage parts are called Conspirator and Dictator, and each contains three plays: Cicero, Catiline and Clodius in the first, and Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian in the second. From this it can be seen that the first play deals with Cicero's consulship (63 BCE) and the subsequent and controversial suppression of Catiline's conspiracy to overthrow the legitimate government of Rome (if that is what it was), while the second deals with Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE and its aftermath up to the death of Cicero in the following year.

Teddy Ferrara

by Christopher Shinn

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 15 October 2015

The play, directed by Dominic Cooke and designed by Hildegard Bechtler, features Luke Newberry as Gabe, Oliver Johnstone as Drew, Matthew Marsh as the college president and Ryan McParland as Teddy.

This play depicts the contradictory and confusing attitudes surrounding campus politics as the administration attempts to deal with calls for less discrimination in the wake of a student suicide. Drew, the editor of the student newspaper, publishes an article claiming that the suicide was gay, though the issue had never before been raised. When Teddy Ferrara, a new gay student, also takes his own life, the situation becomes even more explosive.