Stage review: Incognito, Bush Theatre

Incognito
Bush Theatre
★★★★✩

The image repeats itself throughout Nick Payne's engrossing new play: a ribbon of starlings flocking together, flashes of silver on the wing, creating apparent order from a frenzy of dots.

Stage review: The Secret Agent, Young Vic

STAGE
The Secret Agent
Maria at Young Vic
★★✩✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Theatre O take the prescient themes of Joseph Conrad's classic and present them with intriguing, if disjointed, visual flair.

Stage review: Race, Hampstead Theatre

STAGE
Race
Hampstead Theatre
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
David Mamet's muscular prose commands the stage in a world-weary no-holds-barred dissection of race in America.

Stage review: Di And Viv And Rose, Hampstead

STAGE
Di And Viv And Rose
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Great performances and goodwill paper over any cracks in Amelia Bullmore's lively ode to female friendship.

REVIEW
Viewed from sufficient distance, the planet is featureless. The crevices and eddies of the surface are invisible and inexplicable to an alien.

And such it is with men viewing female friendships. We are clueless outsiders, blindly marking subtleties we cannot fathom. We are still bitching about A when A has been forgiven. We're busy praising B's steadfastness as B heads to cold exile.

Female friendship has a high drag coefficient, swift and slick, while men's sensibilities on the matter are more like a portly buffalo in a headwind.

Di And Viv And Rose does not illuminate the underpinning of such friendships but does present the reason they are worth fighting for. Mutual memories make meaning.

We follow the bustling threesome from an '80s uni house share through the grubby doings of everyday life for the next 27 years - all set to a cracking soundtrack.

Separations, sadness, sex, no sex and men attempt to slice and dice the triumvirate but their bond is not lightly broken.

Writer Amelia Bullmore pulls predictable plot levers to test their loyalties and the soapy traumas come too thick and fast but it's all done with such generous spirit and at such speed that cackling, crying and cluelessness roll into a single bubble of glee.

The cast are a joy. Anna Maxwell Martin is utterly beguiling as the gently promiscuous Rose but there are engaging performances from Tamzin Outhwaite as lesbian Di and Gina McKee as feminist-lite Viv.

There is little here that will linger and it's certainly not without flaws but, like Space Dust and Love Cats, it's all delightfully poppy.

Until Feb 23. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.

Review: Ordinary Dreams, Trafalgar Studios

STAGE
Ordinary Dreams, Trafalgar Studios 2
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
The burden of London life gets too much for Dan in Marcus Markou's patchy but perky take on parental paranoia and middle class meltdown.

REVIEW
Life is tough. Just ask Miles. The Tube, the grind, the hoodies, the Cityboys. Miles will tell you. You break down the daily challenges into their constituent parts and - phewee - that's a lot for a man to take. Miles knows this.

He knows this better than anyone - least he thinks so - and... and not only that, Penny's contractions are - what are they now? - Penny's contractions are a minute apart and the louts are leaving broking glass on the pavements - broken glass! - and next-door's Barry White is bulging the walls... and Miles... well, Miles doesn't like his job, his location, location, location, his life or his lot and, most of all, he doesn't like the prospect of letting down his child.

Miles doesn't want to fail. But Miles is failing.

So life gets the better of Miles (James Lance). And put-upon partner Penny (Imogen Slaughter) now has two new burbling babies in the house and only one of them has any kind of future.

Miles repairs to a wheelchair, semi-catatonic, clad in a stab vest, grumbling and fuming like Alf Garnett leaving Penny to cope. She's a legend when it comes to coping, Penny. Coping with the baby, coping with her own demons, coping with her crumbling marriage and the amorous attentions of an AA cohort.

Miles hasn't got any real angst of course. He's more Mr Benn than Travis Bickle. Not like destructive uni pal Dan (Adrian Bower) who's also a recovering alcoholic with weird dreams of teeth and beetles and celery stalkers. But Dan has hippy chick Layla (Sia Berkeley) to feed him herbal teas so he's happy, right?

"I wish I were an alcoholic," moans Miles. "At least you know who your enemy is."

In director Adam Barnard's perky but patchy Ordinary Dreams, Marcus Markou's script gives the drifting Miles a means to work his way back to Penny and the baby - a fantasy which places the hobbling, jobless no-mark in the role of a Blair-esque aspirant, a people's champion promising a better future than the PM he bests on air.

Rancour

Here's where James Lance's performance comes alive. He's a smoothie by nature - his DNA is as flawless as a Wet'n'Wild spiral ride - so he's more comfortable in his skin as slick Miles than Meldrew Miles.

The production is much the same way. The script scrabbles to please - its focus fixed on the swiftest tack to the next one-liner - so it never entirely reconciles itself to the nerve-shredding rancour at its heart.

Dan Bower and Imogen Slaughter have more grit in their roles, so more traction. Slaughter finds in Penny a flicker of weary warmth, like a dying match in a freezer bag, while Bower finds a redolent lo-fi dryness that makes dissolute Dan the most endearing of the quartet. Siren Sia Berkeley is a dream, picking up the pieces of shattered lives, endlessly artless and optimistic.

Laughs; there are bundles - and hearty ones too. But the pat Ballardian satire can only misfire in a week when we've sunk to a new realm of moral collapse. If the writer had descended this deep to skewer the truth, his nose would have bled and his eardrums burst.

Fortunately, Ordinary Dreams never truly aims to unnerve. It intends to charm and entertain. So we take to the streets, not with grand revolution in our heads but with small change in our pockets.

- First published on wharf.co.uk