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THEATRE REVIEWS
Independent, The (London), Apr 26, 2008
THEATRE REVIEWS
Small Change
Donmar Warehouse, London WC2
Peter Gill's talents as a director and a dramatist are in evidence in this excellent Donmar revival of his 1976 play, in which he draws on his own background for a story about two working-class Cardiff boys struggling to extricate themselves from the apron strings of their domineering mothers - the nervously wrecked Mrs Driscoll (Lindsey Coulson) and Sue Johnston's doughtier and stoically solicitous Mrs Harte. Warmly recommended. To 31 May Paul Taylor
War and Peace
Hampstead Theatre, London NW3
Helen Edmundson's adaptation of the enormous Tolstoy novel is full of Russians dancing, striding, climbing, crouching, brawling, leaping, duelling, whirling. But, while the energy levels hold up throughout Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale's production for Shared Experience, the intellectual and emotional ones remain shallow, and at times these aspects are treated so brusquely as to distort them. To 11 May Rhoda Koenig
Triptych
Southwark Playhouse, London SE1
Triptych shows the effects of a married man's affair on his daughter, mistress and wife, the man appearing only as a huge pair of eyes glowering at each end of the traverse stage. Everything about the play's trite material speaks not only of the self- glorifying exhibitionism of the Sixties and Seventies but of an overwrought adolescent's desire to shock. Triptych cares less about being truthful than theatrical, but the play is too predictable and earnest to be either. To 10 May RK
One Step Forward... One Step Back
Liverpool Cathedral
It might be going a bit far to compare this new production by the Brighton-based company Dreamthinkspeak with the magnificence of Dante's vision, but One Step Forward... One Step Back takes his Paradiso and brilliantly transposes its imagined journey from Hell to Paradise to the nooks, crannies and galleries of Liverpool Cathedral. A show of intricate detail and endless possibilities that merits close scrutiny. To 10 May Lynne Walker
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