All the ingredients are there in writer Paul Sirett and director Dawn Reid’s production – a hiss-able landlord, comedy bad guys on bikes and Jack’s weirdly endearing invisible friend Dizzy (Vlach Ashton), a giant animé-style bunny. But the village set is bland, Wayne Nunes and Perry Melius’s original music is fairly forgettable, and it’s sometimes hard to hear the singing.

Nonetheless, the hip hop-inflected urban edge is a nice touch, and things improve after (and up) the beanstalk. The giant’s kitchen is properly scary – like a ‘Saw’ for kids – and the massive, straggly-haired puppet monster is an impressive piece of design.

The smutty jokes for sniggering parents also soften into some funny moments after the interval. Michael Bertenshaw, who steals the show as Jack’s mum, the hilariously gruff Mrs Trott, brilliantly mangles Shirley Bassey in a spoof of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’.

You could do a lot worse than this panto. But it lacks the sprinkle of charm that would make it a truly festive treat.

First published by Time Out

The Tricycle is known for explicitly political work, but here it simply opens the pages of an anthology of short stories collected over centuries and lets them speak for themselves. Mary Zimmerman’s selected adaptation, first staged in 1992, dispenses with those tales added later by European translators. So gone are Ali Baba and Aladdin, and with them the garish layers of panto and Disney.

The frame remains the same: for three years, King Shahryar of Baghdad has married a new bride and killed her the next morning, as revenge for his first wife’s adultery. This bloodshed continues until he meets a young woman, Scheherazade, who uses the power of storytelling to save her life, sharing a new tale each night to keep his knife from her throat.

The stories unfold within each other, with Scheherzade’s characters telling their own tales, serious and comedic, out of self-protection or remorse. The effect is like a stone dropped in a lake, with narratives rippling off in all directions within the confines of the overarching story. Some of these make a better splash than others.

Themes of betrayal and challenging prejudice loop in and out of Zimmerman’s choice of tales. The tone varies from adult and poignant (the man masquerading as a ruler out of wistful envy because he feels so worthless following the death of the woman he betrayed) to farcical, with three lovers hiding out in a toilet with a cuckolded husband oblivious in another room.

This makes for a scattershot theatrical experience, as matters of life and death stand in uneasy proximity to fart jokes and a ‘zany’ trolley crashes through the back wall of the stage. Each tale works on its own terms, but collectively they tug awkwardly at each other. A strained Gangnam-style dance sequence and some poorly planted modern references are further jarring notes.

But if Lu Kemp’s production occasionally stumbles – perhaps in trying too hard to cater to children as well as adults – this only stands out because of its excellence elsewhere. The set is an exercise in beautiful, magical simplicity, with hanging light bulbs that bob above the stage like a night sky from a dream. It perfectly accompanies the poor-theatre style of performance, which conjures the tales of Scheherazade’s imagination out of just a few props.

This joyful raiding of the dressing up box is matched by an ensemble cast whose rush of exuberance fills the stage with life. Their comic timing is great and they paint their characters brightly and vividly, transforming their posture and demeanour from tale to tale as Scheherazade survives another night and the stories begin again.

Here, storytelling, communicating, changes people and rejuvenates kingdoms, like the grass that appears in the second act as King Shahryar falls in love with Scheherazade and the tales that have broken through the bloody walls of his anger. Given the names and places, it would be easy to treat this as a salutary parable for our times. But its optimism and sense of wonder isn’t bound by geography.

First published by Exeunt Magazine

If you’ve sung enthusiastically along to Houston’s music in trashy karaoke bars since the Eighties and have the film on standby for a weepy night in, you’ll love this show. If neither of these is true, you’ll be wasting your evening and the cost of a ticket. Alexander Dinelaris’s book mostly sticks like glue to Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay and the majority of Houston’s pre-Nineties back catalogue is belted out at some point.

Already planned when Houston died earlier this year, this production isn’t the ghoulish cash-in it might seem. But from the earliest film script, when it was intended as a vehicle for Steve McQueen and Diana Ross, exploitation for mass appeal has been at its heart. One singer no longer has the star wattage she once had? Find another and make a killing with the soundtrack. Skip forward 20 years and now Houston’s hits are the main attraction.

The clear parallels between Houston and her character, Rachel Marron, fed a fantasy of celebrity that turns life into cinema, lived in air-brushed close-up. The thrill of seeing Rachel off-stage in the film has the same comfortable pseudo-voyeurism as a photo-spread in Hello! There is no such thing as ‘behind the scenes’ when fame becomes a fairytale.

This slick production does the same, but by riffing on the tropes of cinema. When Lloyd Owen as Frank Farmer, the titular bodyguard, checks in with colleagues, the lighting is moody and noir-ish – the world of the gumshoe private investigator updated for the internet era. When he rescues Rachel from a crush in a nightclub, the two are silhouetted for several minutes, her in his arms.

Director Thea Sharrock gives us these high-impact images throughout: the iconography of countless film posters compacted into a celluloid punch that marries well with the heightened tenor of anthems like ‘One Moment in Time’ or ‘How Will I Know’. Scenes framed like jump-cuts and a screen that opens and closes like a camera shutter add to this effect. It’s enjoyably slick and well executed.

Less successful are the handful of pre-filmed scenes projected over the action at various points. These cheap-looking attempts to reproduce the visual language of cinema on stage are poor grafts from one medium to another, failing by trying to overlay rather than evoke the show’s filmic origins. A cringing chase sequence through a snowy forest is the worst offender.

If imitation is the worst form of flattery here, Heather Headley succeeds by not trying to impersonate Houston in the lead role. Hers is a less playful, fiercer Rachel, initially suspicious of Farmer and protective of her son. Her voice lacks Houston’s nuance, but she bats the high notes to the back of the theatre in spine-tingling fashion. When she sings ‘I’m Every Woman’ you believe her.

As Rachel lets down her guard, Headley and Owen – who leavens his by-numbers gruff bodyguard with a welcome wryness – cultivate a relationship you’re happy to root for. Their low-key, unforced chemistry gives the show’s flashiness some heart. Debbie Kurup also stands out as Nikki, Rachel’s overshadowed sister, a part given more prominence here than in the film. She and Headley singing ‘I Have Nothing’ reworked as a duet is a high point.

The other characters are cardboard cut-outs, with Rachel’s stalker summed up by a laughably simplistic psychological profile; and while talk of tracing emails and IP addresses neatly updates the story for our CSI era, the linking of his obsession to time spent in Iraq and Afghanistan comes across as crass. And his ability to smuggle a gun into the Oscars is as ridiculous now as it was in 1992.

But if you want depth and nuance, see another show. This is big budget popcorn entertainment that sends Houston’s songs soaring into the rafters. There are questions to be asked about the amount of money ploughed into yet another film adaptation rather than new writing. But if this is your thing, it’ll give you a fix like a sugar high. And I’ll admit that, by the encore, I was absolutely, without a doubt, ready to dance with somebody.

First published by Exeunt Magazine

There’s no doubting the quality of the pieces, which range from a Grimm Tale to a performance of Nick Cave’s sinister ‘Red Right Hand’. But they are thrown together baggily, with seemingly no connection other than being eerie and favourites of the five-strong cast.

This makes for an uneven whole, not helped by some fussily stylised staging and unnecessary audience participation that occasionally distracts from the stories. This production would benefit from more faith in the simplicity of its premise: the elemental power of tales told around a fire.

But when the tale fits the format – an evocative re-telling of Angela Carter’s ‘Tiger’s Bride’ is great – the production musters quite a chill. And Florence + The Machine’s ‘My Boy Builds Coffins’ is crafted into a lovely, leery bit of gothic.

First published by Time Out

As we end Dickens’ bicentenary year, we have heard much about his personal life. A philanderer as much as a philanthropist, late in his marriage he attempted to leave his wife for a teenage actress. But if the man had feet of clay, the social conscience of his prose has travelled as easily through time as the spirits who show Scrooge the error of his ways.

Clean-shaven and anonymously dressed in a baggy overcoat and scarf, Callow is Dickens distilled; not the Victorian author himself, but his essence as a storyteller for every age. This low-key appearance, and a stage bare apart from two sets of stacked chairs on either side, says: this is about words not spectacle. It’s also about Callow’s delivery, which envelops you like a blanket on a winter’s night.

Listening to Dickens’ sentences bloom into life in Callow’s voice is a pleasure, refreshing a story made over-familiar by the glare of film and TV. Much of the joy lies in hearing descriptions spoken aloud that would never make a script: clock-faces chattering in the cold; Mrs Fezziwig swooping into her husband’s party as substantial as a smile; Marley’s ghostly door-knocker face resembling a lobster kept too long in the cellar. If Scrooge is marked by a lack of imagination, the language of his story is gloriously the opposite.

Dickens uses words like colourful building blocks, constructing a London cemented with wry humour and buzzing with life. If he despairs of its treatment of the poor, his love of its noise and energy comes through in Callow’s exuberant delivery. Under Tom Cairns’ canny direction, he sends our gaze all over the stage, conjuring Christmas parties and the throng of a turkey-buying crowd out of some well-placed chairs. Spotlights pick out moments in Callow’s performance, blending with his pauses to create spaces for our imagination to do the rest.

Aided by a stage curtain and some well-timed sound effects, Callow evokes the spirits of past, present and future well, although the graveside horror of Scrooge’s final trip is disappointingly muted. His slack-jawed account of the tormented spirits of the greedy writhing in chains in the night sky is chillingly vivid: one of the few occasions when this becomes a truly ghostly story.

The story’s sharper edges are blunted by a Scrooge presented as testily unpleasant rather than truly cruel. Behind his supernatural redemption is the very human horror of a society that flung its poor into workhouses or prisons: the grotesquely malnourished children, Want and Ignorance, who hide within the folds of the gown of the Ghost of Christmas Present.

But this is a production with its eye on pleasing the crowd. Like Dickens in his day, Callow is thoroughly at home with this kind of public reading, drawing us in with conspiratorial asides and his gleeful enactment of lisping ladies, jolly drunkards and cheeky cockney children. The result is as richly satisfying as turkey and mince pies in front of a blazing fire.

First published by Exeunt Magazine

While his TV shows bristle with multiple characters and plotlines, his plays tend to focus on only a couple of people (sometimes, as in Stacy, just one person), gradually peeling back the layers of their lives. When, on a wet Tuesday in a no-nonsense boozer next to Mansion House, I ask him why this is, he grapples with his answer for a while.

“When I’m writing, I need to see. Do you know what I mean?” he asks. On The Fades, the location manager became an “integral part of the storytelling because he found all these amazing places which I then rewrote the script for.” That’s why, on stage, without this spur of “cut to, cut to, cut to”, Thorne says he has largely stuck to the single-room format: “because if it’s in a room I can see it.”

“That’s just my limitation as a theatre writer at the moment,” he continues. “I’m actually trying to write bigger plays.” He smiles wryly as he brings up his co-written attempt from last year, the National’s coolly received global warming parable Greenland. “It didn’t go so well. But actually that was really important to me in terms of working out how to write bigger. Do you know what I mean?”

“Do you know what I mean?” is a recurring beat with Thorne. Cumulatively – if unintentionally – it’s a deflection that reflects his discomfort with being asked to analyse his work. He’s friendly and likeable, but it’s hard to get him to talk about writing in the abstract. His words come in a compulsive rush or dry up entirely. “It’s very easy to sound pretentious about this shit, and I don’t want to sound pretentious,” he says apologetically.

His aversion to “pretentiousness” is part of what makes Thorne – swamped in a baggy hoodie, hair unruly, when we meet – such a good writer. His creative world isn’t polished; his characters don’t moralise or fit neatly into categories. And limitation or not, in his best plays, his tight focus on a small number of people puts human life under a lens in a way that feels honest and grippingly real.

Unsurprisingly, he shrinks from my praise of the messy naturalism of his dialogue. “It’s good that you think that, but I don’t really have anything intelligent to say apart from that,” he replies, before adding: “But, yeah, thanks!” However, he cautiously admits to being proud of his latest play, Mydidae, which opens in Soho Theatre’s Soho Upstairs space tomorrow. “I think it might be the best thing I’ve written. I could be entirely wrong. But the rehearsal room is really thrilling. I’m having a lovely time.”

Mydidae is another two-hander, but this time the set-up was determined by new-writing theatre company DryWrite. “They work by provocation,” Thorne explains. “And their provocation to me, with this, was to write something set entirely in a bathroom.” Keen not to spoil the plot, all he’ll reveal is that the play is “about a couple going through a very difficult day.”

The title, Latin for ‘Midas Fly’, gestures at the couple’s claustrophobia as they work through their shared sense of guilt and anger over a recent tragedy while in the uncomfortably intimate space of their bathroom. “That feeling of people who are stuck in this place, like trapped flies” is the sensation that Thorne hopes he has captured.

This mundane, almost defiantly un-dramatic simile exists in the same world as the fraying suburbia of Skins, or the partied-out landscape of This Is England ‘86. Everyday life, in all of its bleak and sometimes grimly funny detail, fires Thorne up. Whatever his doubts on the theatre front, it’s this that keeps writing “the best thing in my life, by some degree.”

Whether by looking inward – “when I’m upset, writing helps me to process stuff” – or, inThis Is England ’86, working out “the people Shane’s characters had become” since the end of Meadows’s film This Is England (set a few years earlier) that spawned the series, making the adults and teenagers he writes feel real is Thorne’s overriding goal. “Telling their truthful story is the all-important thing,” he says.

It’s this that connects shows like This Is England ‘86 with The Fades, which beds its tale of an ordinary teenager with special powers (Ian de Caestecker) in a humdrum, familiar world. Thorne is a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy fan, but he was inspired by Susan Cooper’sThe Dark is Rising sequence of novels to write The Fades as much by its Basingstoke setting as anything else.

Jordan concedes a fascination not only with death, but with crime in general. Focusing on New York Upper West Sider Sara, whose actions drive the story, Murder Ballad is rooted in the stories of real-life murders of passion that Jordan observes are now so popular on American television. And from authors like Agatha Christie to Patricia Highsmith, she argues that female writers have a particularly close relationship with violence.

“I think there’s something in us that is brought up to be afraid. Women have to be on their guard and protective. And it’s true – it’s out there, it’s real. It’s something that we’re constantly being told about. We have a fascination with what it is, with could it really happen, and how. And who are the people who do it?”

Jordan believes that this is inflected in crime prose in a way that distinguishes female from male writers, with the notable exception of novelists such as James Ellroy, whose works include The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. “He has, as some men do, another insight,” she argues, “because his mother was murdered.” As a result, “he has something that women have, in that he sees from both sides. He has a way into the victim.”

Writing about murder also offers Jordan a way to lay bare the true nature of people when placed in extreme situations, while indulging her interest in the lurid. “It’s about asking, how far would you go? And the further the story can go, the more dramatic it is, and the more fun it is to write on a really prurient, visceral level – which I kind of love,” she confesses.

Murder Ballad’s name invokes a centuries-old verse form. This sub-genre of the traditional ballad is folky and anecdotal, its tales of murderous events constantly evolving to reflect different people, places and times. It was thanks to Kylie Minogue that Jordan first became aware of it – specifically the video for her haunting duet with Nick Cave, Where the Wild Roses Grow, from his 1996 studio album Murder Ballads.

 “I was living in England at the time, I saw that video and it just struck me,” she recalls. “And then I started hearing murder ballads everywhere,” she laughs. “You know, you realise that ‘Copacabana’ is a murder ballad, that ‘Hey Joe’ is a murder ballad.” Much like the original verses, these songs “are part of our lives. They go right by our ear and we sing along, without always listening to what’s really going on.”

This director-less approach is a distinguishing feature of Grassroots Shakespeare London, which is staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream as part of the Lion and Unicorn’s ‘Magical Shakespearean Christmas’ repertory season, along with The Tempest. It will cap off a successful year for the company, which launched the 2012 More London Free Festival at The Scoop and performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the World Shakespeare Festival. Their production of Much Ado About Nothing at Victoria Embankment Gardens has been nominated for two Off West End ‘Offie’ Awards.

Grassroots Shakespeare London was founded in 2011 by actress and producer Siobhan Daly – who is playing Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – after she met American actor Mark Oram at the Exeter Fringe Festival. Oram had been developing a company in the USA based upon Shakespeare’s original practices called The Grassroots Shakespeare Company. Inspired by his back-to-basics approach to the Bard, Daly became artistic director of the newly-formed London company when Oram returned to the USA.

I met with Daly at the start of rehearsals for the Christmas season to discuss how Grassroots Shakespeare London is bringing the theory of original practices to the UK, the creative benefits of actors directing themselves and how the company treats Shakespeare’s verse respectfully while at the same time stamping their own mark on it.

Definitions of ‘original practice’ differ. What approach does the Grassroots Shakespeare London take?

Over the past couple of hundred years people have come up with their own definitions of how to speak Shakespeare, for example. I think a lot imagine that this involves an Olivier voice. For us, it means exploring ways of getting back to how Shakespeare’s actors would have performed. How can we strip away the paraphernalia of the past few hundred years and just communicate with people?

What does that mean in actual terms?

It means having no director, casting gender-blind instead of just using men, a shorter rehearsal period and generally performing without an interval, because we like things to be quite fast-paced. Here, the Lion and Unicorn have asked to include an interval because they want it to be family-friendly, so parents can take their children out during the break. Ultimately – for us – original practice means keeping things simple and focused on the text.

When did you first encounter ‘original practices’?

Before I met Mark Oram I had no idea how huge Shakespeare was in the USA, and how seriously it was taken. He’d come here to study the MFA in Theatre Practice at Exeter University. I was performing at the Exeter Fringe Festival and saw that he and his company were doing Romeo and Juliet. I got in touch and said, ‘I live in London but I’d love to talk to you, because what you’re doing sounds fascinating.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you come and be our on-stage prompt?’ So I turned up in Exeter with my rucksack, having never met Mark before, and had a great time!

The concept is particularly popular in the USA, isn’t it?

Part of my attraction to it was that I hadn’t come across anything like it in this country. Mark Rylance has been doing work with original practices, but he still has a director where we work without one. That was something that fascinated me when I was in Mark Oram’s rehearsals. As modern actors, we’re trained to work with a director, but that’s a twentieth-century construct. This is how they used to work! And I’ve found that actors become so liberated, creative and confident this way. That’s been one of the nicest things for me to see, as the person who facilitates it.

Can you give me an example of how it works in the rehearsal room?

We begin the process by going through the script and identifying areas that are going to need more work than others, for example where the blocking is going to be tricky. Then, for example, we might look at the storm scene in The Tempest. The actor playing Prospero might say, ‘This feels very ritualistic and although I’m not written into the scene, I’d like to be involved.’ The actors will say yes or no. It’s amazing how people find consensus – there’s no ego. Everyone’s working towards the same objective.

So there are never major disagreements?

Never – it’s performance by consensus. Actors are trained. They know what works and what doesn’t. I always tell them that it’s about going back to a sense of play, like we did when we were kids, hiding under blankets and making things happen. There’s no failure: if something doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You’ll know as well as the rest of the room when something falls flat on its face. It’s about taking any good ideas that may have arisen and trying something else instead. You’d be amazed at how that really does work.

Do you ever change the text?

Because we prefer a 1.5 hour running time, we do edit. So, with The Tempest, we took out some of the secondary characters. In that sense, we stay close to the text, but in a Shakespearean way – fitting a play to our needs is what would have been done at the time. Shakespeare was in rehearsals, devising as they went. That’s why you have lots of paired characters who are tall and small: he was writing for the friendships of tall and small actors. You can also see it in the change from physical clowning to something much wordier, once someone leaves. We’re not being disrespectful; the story and the text are important to us. But the differences between the quartos and folios show that they had a rough draft, which they used as a means to an end. That’s what we’re doing with what Shakespeare has given us.

What is the effect of a reduced rehearsing period?

It puts actors under pressure, but it’s a good pressure. They’re not being fed answers or being told that they have to stand here, or behave like that. They have to go away and really understand their characters and the story beforehand. It helps keep everyone focused and driven. They don’t have time to mess around; they’ll have done their work before they arrive. So, right now, we’re able to focus on the blocking and the creative side of staging. It also means people don’t get bogged down in a long rehearsal period, which the actors we work with like. They enjoy the excitement of being on stage right from the start.

What is your role, as both the company’s co-founder and one of its performers?

I audition as well. I could not have made the final cut in these plays. I put myself in that position because I want to gel with the ensemble. It’s not a vanity project. If I didn’t get voted in, I’d just produce a show and have fun doing it. Part of being an actor going through the audition process over the years is that it either knocks it out of you or builds you up. It makes you ask whether you really want to do it, because, otherwise, there’s not an awful lot of reward. I get my reward from telling a story, and I love seeing people engaging with Shakespeare. One of my favourite clips from our website is of two ladies reacting to the first show we ever did. Their language is really colourful, but essentially they said that they didn’t like Shakespeare at school but they absolutely loved it here. That’s why I do it.

Why did you decide to pair The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

They were actually two plays that the Lion and Unicorn asked us to do. They paired them together as part of a magical Shakespearean Christmas, with fairies and mystical happenings. These are family-friendly shows for the festive season.

How has it been, working with the Lion and Unicorn?

It’s fantastic. They’re so supportive. Tamzin and George, who run the theatre, are absolutely brilliant, and they have so much faith in us. So much so, they’ve also asked us to perform Othello at the Lion and Unicorn next April. It’s really rare to meet people with so much faith in new talent. They came to see our Much Ado About Nothing and loved it, and asked us to work with them. George gets as excited as I do about things. He’ll call me up and go, ‘You’ll never guess what – we’re sold out on both press nights!’, and we’ll both go ‘Ooh’ over the phone!

Why should audiences come to this season of plays?

Because they’re fun, exciting, accessible and affordable. There’s a £10 offer on tickets for the last few days in November. You can’t go into the West End on that amount of money. It’s the price of a train fare if you’re lucky! And I really believe that the next generation of strong British actors are in this ensemble. These are actors willing to do repertory theatre and to hone their craft. There’s a big debate in the papers about the lack of repertory companies. It’s sad for my generation of actors that we don’t have that opportunity. But I’m not the type to sit around and lament it. I want to create those opportunities. Fringe isn’t lucrative, so this cast is doing it for other reasons: for the love of Shakespeare and for the love of communicating that.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens at 6pm on 11 December, followed by The Tempest at 8:30pm. The productions will then play on alternate nights until early January. For more information, and tickets, see: http://giantolive.com/

First published by OffWestEnd.com

Gene David Kirk’s production of Bill Solly and Donald Ward’s hugely fun 1975 comedy musical – the show’s UK premiere and Kirk’s swansong as Jermyn Street’s artistic director – smuggles in a brilliant alternative history of marriage via old-fashioned high jinks and some catchy songs.

Stephen Ashfield (in ‘The Book of Mormon’ next) and Craig Fletcher are in fine voice, and touching as American hack Casey O’Brien and the gawky aristocrat he falls for, Guy ‘English’ Rose. A hilarious Ben Kavanagh chews up the scenery and most of the stage as Guy’s ex, the deliciously droll Clarence Cutler.

Cheeky without being sleazy – quite a feat in a show featuring a rousing tribute to the Boy Scout movement – the show’s laugh-out-loud lyrics and sweeping orchestration are accompanied by a wink to the audience that steers clear of high camp. Unashamedly heart-warming, this is, refreshingly, ‘gay’ in more than one way.

The identity confusion that drives the plot is patently ludicrous, and the show’s broad tone won’t be for everyone. But buoyed along by Lee Proud’s exceptional choreography in such a small space (including a great slow-build ensemble tap number) and performed with gusto, its frothiness is joyous.

First published by Time Out

This small but perfectly formed play – not seen in London since it was commissioned in 2000 by the National Theatre to mark the centenary of Wilde’s death – is based on a single fact: in a telegram dated 25 March 1895, Wilde told his friend Ada Leverson that he had been to visit the famed Mrs Robinson the night before. From this detail, Bartlett weaves a melancholic tale in which the pair’s encounter becomes an exploration of hopes, fears and the elasticity of truth.

Kate Copeland is compelling as Mrs Robinson, a precise and measured figure who drops the names of the lords and ladies she knows with the anxiety of someone constantly shoring up her social foundations. Palmistry, like spiritualism, was much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century, but just round the corner from her home is a house full of boys who also provide a service to Wilde.

Director Caroline Devlin fills her production with clever mismatches. Wilde isn’t wearing the lemon-coloured gloves Mrs Robinson professes to recall, and he isn’t flamboyantly attired. What we see on stage is myth-making in action: the figure of the playwright sketched from a future vantage point, exaggerated by time and notoriety.

Nigel Fairs’ Wilde is actually a quiet and reserved figure, cold and embittered. When he takes over from Mrs Robinson as narrator, we learn that this self-styled modern man is trapped by the fiction he has created for himself. He loathes his public image, preferring the role of puppet-master, yanking the strings of audiences with his words. It’s an effective performance, tinged with sadness and marred only by Fairs’ occasional hesitation over his lines.

As the playwright and the palm-reader turn to us and attempt to outdo each other in their reading of the other’s character, verisimilitude as an impossible goal is replaced by a much more human truth: that we see what we want, or need, to see. Wilde may sneeringly dismiss Mrs Robinson as a dull woman, but he needs her to chart out his course for him. The reassurance of making connections is as much behind palm-reading as it is writing.

Ultimately, Mrs Robinson finds her place by putting the playwright in his. And the effectiveness of In Extremis lays in the way Bartlett juxtaposes conflicting accounts of Wilde’s character – already an invention by the man himself – to explore the process of storytelling that underpins and informs how we receive history and pass it on.

Interestingly, Mrs Robinson’s palmistry book The Graven Palm (which she mentions proudly) is still in print today. Our need to conjure truth out of ambiguity is undiminished. Is the triumph that Mrs Robinson predicts for Wilde at the end of the play made real by his literary legacy or exposed as a lie by the failure of his trial? Bartlett quite rightly leaves the answer up to us.