Oliver!

“I'm seriously late to the party, but I've finally seen Arcadia in the West End. I've never needed convincing of Tom Stoppard's brilliance, but seeing this one live is something else entirely. Written in the early nineties, the play is built on chaos theory, thermodynamics and Fermat's Last Theorem (whatever that is). The play follows two sets of characters in the same country house, two hundred years apart, and its themes are mathematics, landscape gardening and romance. An unusual pairing, you may be thinking. But what makes it so moving is Stoppard's insistence that the way we divide the world into head and heart, reason and feeling, is a false split: the two were never separate at all. I should confess that I was lost roughly 28% of the time, as were my friends, and it did not matter in the slightest. Once I stopped chasing the equations, I was free to follow the play's heart. It is also, unexpectedly, very funny, with a mind-boggling performance by young star Isis Hainsworth. Would I pass a quiz on it? No. Did I feel things? Deeply. It has only a few more weeks in London, go!”

“Nothing gets an audience roaring quite like an outrageous dinner party scene. Add slapstick and chaotic choreography and it might as well be Christmas Day. By the time the dinner in the Old Vic's new production of How The Other Half Loves reached full crescendo, audience members were gripping their chairs and stomachs for relief. Alan Ayckbourn's 1969 farce traces the fallout of an affair between a married man and his boss's wife. Its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue (which paved the way for decades of British sitcoms) is a soufflé of a script: get the timing even slightly wrong and the whole thing sinks. On the page, some of the night's biggest laughs would barely register. So, what a treat to witness West End legend Roger Allam in full throttle as Frank, barely needing to lift a finger to trigger bellows from the stalls. But that is the beauty of farce: delivery is king, and boy did this cast deliver. Bring the dad who still quotes Fawlty Towers. Or don't: I am a thirty-year-old woman and I was in stitches, as was Rob Brydon, seated directly in front of me. Either way, this is a night of gloriously light-hearted fun.”