LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Killers stroll down our streets. Men and women who spend sleepless nights mentally reliving the charnel houses of Afghanistan and Iraq, their fingers twitching with the muscle memory of squeezing that cold metal trigger. Who knows what atrocities they witnessed or perpetrated? Many sink into suicidical ideation; finding the lines between warzone and home blurred beyond recognition.

Man Down explores these ghosts of war, following Gabriel Drummer's (Shia LaBeouf) progression from starry eyed new recruit to dead-eyed, delusional maniac.

Director Dito Monteil takes a chronologically tangled route to get there, leaping between Gabriel's Full Metal Jacket style training, his pre-deployment home life with concerned yet strong wife Natalie (Kate Mara) and outrageously mopheaded son Jonathan (Charlie Shotwell), his deployment in Afghanistan, a post-battle psychological evaluation and a Mad Max style post apocalyptic quest to save his son from child slavery in the chemically scarred ruins of contemporary America.

Say what now? It's in that last setting that Man Down shifts gears into high concept cinema, presenting us with surreal chunks of action that appear airdropped in from a completely different movie.

Monteil is going somewhere with all this, and, to his credit, watching all that congeal into a coherent narrative is at least interesting. That's perhaps the nicest thing to say about it, as damn near everything else about Man Down is a load of hamhanded, hackneyed rubbish.

Most problems stem from a script that attempts to place us in the protagonist's shattered mind to directly experience his trauma, psychosis and dissociation. It comprehensively fails to do this: the film's depiction of mental illness would be offensive if it wasn't so patently ridiculous. Matters aren't helped by a cast of paper-thin supporting characters whose lives are spent gazing with vague concern at Shia LaBeouf.

LaBeouf, at least, comes out of this relatively unscathed. Gabriel Drummer is the kind of role he's been excelling at lately: a tightly wound, introverted (and bushily bearded) bundle of neuroses whose calm exterior cracks and eventually shatters. There are moments where he, through sheer force of will alone, makes the film watchable. This is most evident in an extended scene between him and a psychiatrist (played by Gary Oldman), where the restrained drama of a mentally wounded man being gently pushed out of his comfort zone works well.

But for the most part, he and everyone else in the film is lost in a swamp of directorial cliches, cheap looking sets and eye-rollingly dumb dialogue. It's hard to suppress the gag reaction when you watch slow motion scenes of soldiers training at sunset scored by dirge-y soft rock, or the embarrassingly broad way Monteil cuts between a dead family in Afghanistan and the hero's smilingly perfect one back home. Annoyingly, the film also displays zero regard for the audience's memory, constantly flashing back to important dialogue in prior scenes to absolutely ensure we connect the dots. Dammit man, the film's only 90 minutes long, we're not goldfish!

The cherry on the top of this unappetising cake is a clapped out visual style that's all desaturated colours, iffy digital compositing and largely pointless shaky-cam. This militaristic aesthetic was new and exciting in Black Hawk Down, but the 14 subsequent years of recruitment adverts and direct-to-DVD oo-rah clangers have drained all impact from it.

For all that I can't find it in myself to hate Man Down, which,for all its stumbles is a pleasantly loopy piece of cinema. Granted, it's an aesthetic failure with a strained narrative and deeply garbled message, but it's trying to do something interesting - at least it's not boring.

★★

Blood of My Blood (aka Sangue del mio Sangue) is a tricky little devil. It's composed of two distinct halves that bear little obvious relation to one another. It's also the latest film from the 75 year old Italian director Marco Bellocchio, and is liberally stuffed with references to his previous work, recurring characters and cryptic in-jokes. Not having seen any of his other films, all these callbacks whooshed straight over my head.

The first half is set in a 17th century convent of Bobbio and sees a group of priests trying to prove young nun Benedetta's (Lidiya Liberman) collusion with Satan. A priest has committed suicide following an erotic tryst with her, and is thus destined to be buried in the 'Donkey Cemetery'. His twin brother Federico (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) attends her trials, hoping to witness her confession and secure his brother's burial in sanctified ground.

The second, less successful, portion is set in modern Bobbio, with the convent now home to reclusive vampire Count Basta (Roberto Herlitzka). Rarely leaving his lair, he and his undead cronies run the town as their a mini-fiefdom, skimming off the cream of corruption by evading tax and falsifying disability claims. Things are shaken up when tax inspector Federico (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio again) arrives with Russian millionaire Ivan (Ivan Franek), who wants to buy the convent and convert it into a luxury hotel.

It's in the 17th century setting that all of my favourite parts lie. The images of a calm, composed woman staring out at a gaggle of blotchy-faced middle-aged holy men as they pass judgment on her quickly recalling Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. As Benedetta's trials become ever more gruesome, the convent becomes a psychological pressure cooker, with guilt, erotic desire and a particularly Christian self-loathing bubbling under the surface.

Bellocchio's supremely confident direction, combined with Daniele Cipri's cinematography and Carlo Crivelli's bold score, provide a procession of indelible moments. The best of these are a 'ducking' sequence in which Benedetta is weighed down with chains and thrown into a lake. Composed of stately, exacting long-shots and tight close-ups of Liberman, the scene climaxes in a shot looking up from under the water as her body hits the surface. It's a beautiful piece of film-making; tense, terrifying and stunningly evocative.

The film regularly hits these high notes throughout this portion, the dark, austere candle-lit interiors proving to be fertile aesthetic territory. Things reach a zenith in the film's surreal, woozily dream-like climax, which I won't spoil here, but is a real masterclass in lighting, pacing, performance and showing the audience just enough to allow us to comprehend what's going on.

This firmly seated awesome-ness makes the switch to modernity rather jarring. I can only assume that these sequences are intentionally ugly to highlight crass materialism. Similarly dislocating is that, despite Helitzka's commandingly regal performance, the second half is stuffed with hammy over-acting. By far the worst offender is Filippo Timi, whose wince-inducing mugging goes down like a lead balloon, though the rest of these moribund broad comedic turns don't fare much better.

The credits eventually roll with little obvious connection between the 17th century and vampiric present, save some tantalising casting choices. The rustling of scratched heads and slightly perplexed applause quickly gave way to a cinema-full of people turning to their companions and asking "what the hell was that about?"

Frankly, I'm not sure either. There's a critique in contrasting our instinctive condemnation of historical corruption and our acceptance of it's modern equivalent - though I'm not entirely sure that branding a woman with red-hot iron and manipulating a disabled tax allowance is quite the same thing. Also in the mixing pot is a cynical analysis of the way religion warps and distorts society, institutional violence (torture vs. bloodsucking) and the well-off preying on the poor.

I suspect a proper analysis of Blood of My Blood would rest on a comprehensive knowledge of Bellocchio's filmography, the Catholic church and Italian cultural norms - all which largely elude me. Despite all that, I enjoyed myself - I don't particularly mind being baffled and the film is constructed so meticulously that large portions function as a cinematic and performative masterclass.

★★★

The highest praise I can give a movie is that it's changed my life. And Anomalisa has indeed changed mine. From now until the day I die I won't be able to hear Cyndi Lauper's new wave classic Girls Just Want To Have Fun without a tear in the corner of my eye. That was the last thing I expected, but then Anomalisa is a film positively exploding with surprises big and small.

Granted that's pretty much what you expect from Charlie Kaufman, whose scripts and films sparkle with down-at-heel magical realism, raw emotional honesty and recognisable, restrained characterisation. He's perhaps alone in modern cinema in being able to perfectly synthesis these elements, as ably demonstrated in his screenplays for outright classics like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and his direction of Synecdoche, New York. Yet in Anomalisa this formula refines itself further still.

Without wishing to spoil too much of the plot, the protagonist is business advice author and key note speaker Michael (voiced by David Thewlis). He's purposeless, numbed by a loveless marriage and haunted by his failed past relationships. Michael's depressed manifests as every other person in the world sharing the same face and the same moderated, passionless intonation (provided by Tom Noonan). Yet, while staying a hotel he meets Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the only other person in his world that speaks with their own voice.

Anomalisa tells a story of intentionally limited scope, Kaufman prunes away the extraneous until we're left with three voices and a handful of dowdy locations. The most immediately obvious thing that's been abandoned is the human body; Anomalisa is a stop motion film populated by puppets that sit on just the right side of the uncanny valley. To clarify, this isn't the claymation of Aardman Animations (wonderful though that it is), or clumsy Supermarionation, it aims for a straightforward realism, just with dolls instead of people.

I won't go into the technicals of how it achieves this, save to say that about 30 seconds into the film you completely, utterly, sincerely, truly buy Michael as a dramatic, empathetic figure. This is stop motion unlike anything I've seen before - a straight-up masterpiece of animation. This is courtesy of co-director Duke Johnson, whose most notable prior work to date has been on stop motion segments within sitcom Community.

I really can't overemphasise how gorgeous the film is, each microscopic twitch of emotion on the character's faces perfectly conveyed, each slump of their shoulders betraying inner pain and even the sparkle in their eyes looking like these things are about to come to Pinocchio-ish life.

The easy highlight is a reasonably graphic sex scene; there's probably a rulebook for stop motion animation that advises in the strongest possible terms to avoid the potentially ludicrous prospect of puppet sex. But what could have been a Team America bashing of wooden groins proves to be simply magical. The few giggles in the audience are quickly silenced as we see one of the most realistic, touching and moving depictions of on screen sex in the last decade or so. It's packed with little moments, people accidentally bonking their head on the wall, self-consciously flinching at unexpected touches and finally melting into blissful embracing.

By all rights this scene shouldn't be be possible, yet Johnson and Kaufman are weaving some kind of magic, using their characters' artificial nature as a boon rather than something to overcome.

Anomalisa would be worthy of recommendation simply as a technical exercise, but in its thematic, performative and emotional elements it heads into the cinematic stratosphere. David Thewlis is one of the finest British actors working today, and though this is 'just' voiceover, Michael might be his finest performance to date. Cynical, intelligent and above all lonely, he conveys depression so keenly it hurts. He's aided by the typically Kaufman technique of manifesting his mindset in the world surrounding him, everyone having the same face and voice being both creepy, sad and dramatically appropriate.

When he finds Lisa, who speaks with her own voice, it's impossibly moving. He's enraptured by her, a gruff man made vulnerable and needy. As with literally everything else in the film, their interactions are immaculately pitched and directed. As mentioned above, my highlight was her rendition of Girls Just Want To Have Fun, which held a gigantic cinema filled with thousands of people in stunned silence, nobody so much as coughing for fear of breaking the spell.

Charlie Kaufman is one of the most exciting, original writer/directors in contemporary cinema and Anomalisa is his best film to date. It's a triumph in every aspect, from the ambition, vision and technical rigour required even consider making a stop motion drama, to the miraculously amazing final product.

Missing Anomalisa is not an option.

★★★★★

Somewhere up above the bombs have begun to fall. Muffled booms shake dust down from the bunker's ceiling. You're deep underground - protected from the apocalypse, the blasts of fire, the radioactive fallout - safe with your family. In comparison with the poor bastards on the surface you're doing pretty good. After all, just a couple of days, weeks or months down here and you can emerge and rebuild, right?

This is the launching point of Only Forever, an exercise in psychological post-apocalypse drama courtesy of writer Abrahan Arsis. We're locked in with a typically middle-class British family, circa sometime in the 50s. They are; can-do patrician George (Edward Pinner); loving/limping housewife Margaret (Christine Rose); arrested development adolescent Victoria (Jennie Eggleton); and nice-but-dim preteen Charles (Lewys Taylor).

At the outset they appear the model of stiff upper lip domesticity. The father is stern yet affectionate, assigning his family chores to keep the bunker shipshape. Mother Margaret provides friendly emotional support, washing sheets and fetching water from the well. The children study Shakespeare and power the lights by exercising on a bicycle hooked to a dynamo. Yet as events progress, dark secrets become exposed and fissures form within the family unit, leading to anger, depression, betrayal and all that yummy stuff that makes drama worth watching.

As the play takes place in just one location, set design and dressing is key. The Hope Theatre isn't the biggest performance space around, but the cramped stage with concrete painted walls works well in the play's favour. Sat in the front row I had the performers brushing up against my knees, often in danger of knocking my pint over. As someone who loves getting as close as possible to the performers this is all great stuff - in the dining scenes I felt as if I was sat at the table with them. Similarly, the walls and shelves are peppered with period appropriate books, boxes of recycled scraps and battered looking crockery. The lighting designer also gets decent mileage out of the flicker and pop of fluorescent bulbs as the power on.

Performance-wise the obvious standout is Jennie Eggleton's Victoria. Much of the dramatic weight of the play rests on her shoulders, combining childish mischievousness with hormonal yearnings and Christian sex guilt to marvellous effect. Lewys Taylor also impresses as a child actor - the play is broadly naturalistic and the role requires suspension of audience belief about his age, which he manages with aplomb. Edward Pinner and Christine Rose are a little less effective; with Pinner often sounding a bit Radio 4 Afternoon Drama and Rose substituting character depth in favour of having a dodgy knee.

Still, the narrative rumbles on effectively - the script constantly drops tantalising hints of dark doings within the bunker - leaving it up the audience's wild imagination what they're all hiding. The danger with this is that nothing the writer can do will live up to what the audience wants, but Only Forever avoids this by having a satisfying series of reveals and twists in the final scenes that cast shadows over everything we've seen.

But though this is an satisfying serving of genre drama, recalling everything from Neville Shute's On the Beach to the similarly bunker-set Fallout series of videogames, there's a constant sense of slightness. Frequent reference is made to Romeo and Juliet, though there's scant parallels between these stories' themes and preoccupations. Also, the Church of England religion of the family is often front and centre though aside from them being in subterranean purgatory, the absence of God from their lives is given short shrift. The closest the play comes to being 'about' something is its interrogation of gender politics, though even this never quite reaches full thematic fruition.

This leaves Only Forever as an enjoyable way to spend 75 minutes, yet not a particularly memorable one. Still, Jennie Eggleton in particular should be pleased with what they've accomplished, as should the technical crew and director Poppy Rowley, who create an evocatively claustrophobic mise en scene.

★★★

Only Forever runs until the 26th of September. Tickets here.

David Beeves is a lucky man. He can fix cars without any training. He buys a run-down gas station and the government decide to run the new freeway past it. He's married to his childhood sweetheart in a palatial home. Everyone in town instinctively regards him as a 'good man', falling over themselves to do him favours and grant him opportunities. Yet while fortune smiles ever more brightly upon him, his friends and family wallow in mediocrity and failure. Why should the universe hand everything to him on a silver platter while everyone else scrapes for a solitary crust?

This is the conceit of The Man Who Had All the Luck, generally regarded as Arthur Miller's 'lost' play. Written in 1940, the play reached New York stages in 1944. It was a dramatic failure, running for just four performances and almost spoiling Miller's nascent career. It wasn't until 1990 when the Bristol Old Vic staged a well-received revival, followed by a transfer to London. Now End of Moving Walkway have brought it back to the King's Head, to impressive effect.

Taking place over a decade or so, we follow the rising fortunes of David Beeves (Jamie Chandler) as he succeeds in business and wins the hand of town beauty Hester (Chloe Walshe). Meanwhile his brother Amos (Michael Kinney) is being moulded into a pro-baseball pitcher by their father Pat (Keith Hill), hoping against hope to be picked up for the big leagues.

Though not to the dizzying standards of his later work, the script is liberally sprinkled with eloquent lyrical moments. Miller's characters spin satisfying analogies on the nature of fate, monologue about their disappearing dreams and weave complex philosophical notes into their observations. Impressively this is all done invisibly - these always remain salt of the earth characters - yet we never detect the heavy hand of author didacticism at work.

Most enjoyable is the way the protagonist's luck deforms the conventional narrative. Throughout the play, David, his friends and we in the audience all await his eventual downfall. After all, to receive all this good fortune must surely mean that he's heading for a fall - and a big one at that. Frustrations mount as it never arrives, David always snatching victory from the jaws of what seems like certain defeat.

Underneath this satisfying drama run undercurrents of history, politics and economics. America in 1940 was still gripped by depression, with individuals feeling at the mercy of vast, unknowable financial machinery. Miller returns repeatedly to an analogy of man as jellyfish at sea, swept in and out on the tides without control. This rings as true today as it did 75 years ago, our employment, social infrastructure, healthcare and the price we pay for bread dependent on the whims of the free market.

Trapped within these byzantine systems, blind luck seems impossibly unfair. Why is it that one man rises to the top of the pile while another rots in poverty? Worse, those that gaze coolly down from their golden towers deny that luck had anything to do with their success, implying that it's only through lack of effort that the rest of us lead precariously balanced lives.

All this gives The Man Who Had All the Luck a vitality that prevents it feeling dated. Helping matters are a smattering of excellent performances. In Jamie Chandler's David we sense the 'good man' that his neighbours are attracted to, yet there's a faint unworldiness that bristles the hairs on the back of your neck. Early on he's berated by the father of his prospective bride, who forcefully explains that there's something very wrong with David. We pick up on this in the performance - there's something inhuman lurking behind that prettyboy gaze.

The supporting cast are no chumps either, with particularly evocative performances from Keith Hill as a sort of proto-Willy Loman and Mark Turnbull as JB, a larger than life, intrinsically period American man. From minute one you know you're in safe hands and it's a pleasure watching these performers ricochet off one another via Miller's powerfully written dialogue. Supporting this is a minimalist yet successful set, within which is hidden a late dramatic flourish that works gangbusters as comment on destiny.

It's deeply satisfying watching The Man Who Had All the Luck coalesce: narrative, performance, subtext and stagecraft all combining into to make a play that runs as sweetly as a Swiss watch. Recommended.

★★★★

The Man Who Had all the Luck runs until the 27th of September. Tickets here.

I must admit, a play about the friendship between a farmer and the local vet doesn't exactly sound like an edge-of-your-seat thrillride. But then this is Theatre 503 - they could advertise watching paint dry and it'd be a fascinating evening. So expectations were high for And Then Come The Nightjars, especially as it's the winner of the first Theatre 503 Playwriting Award, spending a month on the London fringe before a transfer to the Bristol Old Vic.

Set in rural South Devon, the play chronicles the relationship between two men over 12 years. Michael (David Fielder) is the Platonic ideal of the west country farmer. Marvellously bBearded, gruff, practical to a fault and utterly sure of this place in the world, he fits the farmland setting perfectly. Following the death of his wife Sheila, he's devoted himself to his prize-winning herd of cows, each named after members of the Royal Family. In the opening scene, one of them is calving: he looks with the nervous tension of a father-to-be in a hospital corridor.

Assisting him is Jeff (Nigel Hastings). He's a middle-class professional, more effete than the farmers he assists but respected for his veterinary skills. Michael and Jeff jokily pass the time with one another, nervously alluding to dark tidings on the horizon. This proves to be the beginnings of the Foot and Mouth epidemic that carved a bloody swathe across rural Britain, necessitating the destruction of tens of thousands of cows.

Later that year, an already traumatised Jeff has been tasked with killing all of Michael's cows. Michael is despondent, angry and desperate, scrabbling around for some get-out clause and pleading with Jeff not to murder 'his girls'. Yet it must be done, their friendship becoming poisoned by pyres of smoking bone and sizzling grease. Is it possible to forgive after this?

A contemporary rural setting is a rare sight on stage. Firstly, playwrights tend to both live in and write about cities (as, well, that's where theatres are), combined with the obvious difficulties in recreating the great British countryside in a room above a Battersea pub. But the moment you see Max Dorey's outstanding set, the thrum of metropolitan life recedes into the distance. As someone who largely grew up in the countryside, the attention to detail was stunning; from the power extension cords snaking around the breezeblock walls to the dirt marks on the wooden beams to (in a seriously brilliant touch) the dots of moss collecting in the grooves of the corrugated plastic roof; this is an deeply evocative bit of set design.

It's aided by Sally Ferguson's excellent lighting scheme that conjuries up the world beyond. Various forms of sunlight illuminate the room, slatted rays shining through the beams or the gentle orange-pink sunrise streaming in through an open door. In more dramatic moments, everything else cuts out to leave the harsh orange of flickering flames, underlined by the hiss and crackle of burning flesh.

This technical and artistic precision makes for a rock solid performative scaffolding. Both David Fielder and Nigel Hastings are outstanding in their roles, effortlessly involving us in the fears, joys and sadness of their characters. Fielder that stands out, imbuing Michael with hilariously rough-hewn sturdiness. As we progress to the point where his beloved cows are scheduled for destruction, his gruff masculinity slipping away as he pleads for their lives. It's heartbreaking - Fielder achieves emotional rawness that I genuinely straight-up cared about the welfare of these imaginary, off-stage cows. This is a scarily intense sequence, yet more restrained delights follow, culminating in a touching paean to an undisturbed, quiet rural life.

Hastings has a slightly trickier job. Nigel has to be broken down and reconstituted, with the trickiest bit playing him concussed, drunken and blood-smeared without dipping too far into slapstick. He achieves this with gusto, physically embodying every aspect of drunkenness (a highpoint being a disturbingly realistic portrayal of a guy about to puke all over himself). By the time the curtain falls the two actors have intertwined around one other, each equally supporting the other.

I'd never seen a Bea Roberts play prior to this, but by this standard she's clearly an outstanding writer. And Then Come The Nightjars is a play with scope: one moment a knockaround comedy double act, the next a traumatising psychodrama, even (for a brief moment) a soft-shoe-shuffle vaudeville number. Despite this tonal range, the core drama is solidly locked down, the shifting relationship between these two men utterly compelling.

It's this level of all-around quality that fringe theatre should aspire to; focussing on nuanced performances and intelligent staging rather than heaping ladles of razzle-dazzle.This is Theatre 503's carefully staked out territory, and as someone who sees an awful lot of fringe theatre, they've once again reminded me why they're the best in town.

And Then Come The Nightjars is quite brilliant. Whether in London or Bristol - go!

★★★★

And Then Come The Nightjars runs at Theatre 503 until 26 September, and then at the Bristol Old Vic from 6 - 17 October 2015.

In hindsight, perhaps the all-singing rape scene wasn't the greatest idea in theatrical history. This is just one of many problems with See What I Wanna See: a tangled mess of a musical that stumbles t from the get-go.

Based on three short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the show is composed of three vignettes. The first, set in medieval Japan, tells the brief story of doomed lovers Kesa and Morito. This is conveyed by having two slightly embarrassed looking actors joylessly dry hump each other while they lyrically assure us that they're having the time of their lives.

The second act finds us in New York, 1951, where we partake in the predatory behaviour of psychopath Jimmy Mako. He's entranced by a nightclub singer and resolves to dispatch both her and a troublesome husband. To this end he lures them into a park, ties up the husband and rapes the singer. You'd think she'd object a bit afterwards, yet instead she turns on her husband and sides with the serial killer rapist.

The final act is once more set in New York, now post 9/11. A priest has lost his faith and, bitter with the world and everyone in it, concocts a false prophecy of a miracle where Christ will arise from a lake in Central Park. His lie catches on and soon spiritually desperate New Yorkers are thronging the lake, hoping against hope for holy salvation on 'Glory Day'.

None of these stories are particularly interesting; the characters are creaky one-dimensional stereotypes, the dialogue/lyrics banal and the narrative sending me to the point of snoozedom. At it's worst it feels like someone tried to write an intentionally bad musical, especially in cringeworthy moments where a Lindsay Lohan-a-like sings: "Thank God for my dealer / And for the vodka / That mellows the coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. Yeah." Or for that matter, some of the opening lyrics: "He knifes into my body / Forcibly and proud / My love is incredibly endowed / Thicker than my husband."

I mean... I just... it... well... ah...

Sigh.

Still, credit to the cast for delivering this with a straight face. All five, Jonathan Butterell, Cassie Compton, Marc Elliott, Mark Goldthorp and Sarah Ingram, have multiple characters to play across the different time periods. They approach this task with gritted-teeth professionalism, eking out what little enjoyment is possible from reciting this guff. Even so, the night is sprinkled with bum notes from the cast, and a dully workmanlike job from the band.

This is received by an increasingly sullen audience. There's little pauses after each number where, theoretically, we should applaud but instead we sat there silently, wishing they'd just get on with it.

Amazingly, there is one moment that enters the realm of 'good'. The number 'The Greatest Practical Joke' proves to be, by far, the best thing in the show. Delivered with gusto by Sarah Ingram, it displays a lyrical sharpness that's so at odds with everything else in the show that I have my doubts its even from the same writer. The number is met with a smattering of stunned applause, both for Ingram's performance and in surprise that something of genuine quality has poked its head up from the muck.

Were it not for this singular moment, the evening would have been a complete write-off. As it was it's just a waste of time. Having done a bit of post-show research on writer/composer Michael LaChuisa, I'm perplexed to find that he's highly regarded by musical theatre aficionados for his narrative and musical adventurousness. Now, I'll grant you that most musicals don't go in for toe-tapping rape/murder scenes, coked out priest fucking and Rashomon aping alt-narratives, but it largely comes across as a sophomoric attempt at edginess while hinting at intellectual depths that just aren't there.

See What I Wanna See? I wanna see something else.

★★

See What I Wanna See is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 3 October. Tickets here.

Exploring World War I through the medium of musical theatre takes balls. Accurately conveying the mind-melting horror of the Western Front is difficult in any medium and the prospect of all-singing, all-dancing Tommies warbling on about missing limbs and shell-shock is not an appealing one. Thankfully The White Feather remains on the right side of good taste, taking the correct decision to focus its attention on the home front and explore the psychologies of the men and woman affected by the war, rather than attempt to recreate the trenches on stage.

The show gets its title from the propagandist use of a white feather to symbolise cowardice. Those who refused to participate in state sanctioned murder were branded traitors, publicly humiliated by women and children handing white feathers. By denting the masculinity of the recipient, it was hoped that they'd throw themselves into the meatgrinder out of sheer shame. It worked.

Set in the Suffolk village of Upton Davey, the show follows several interwoven lives. Most prominent are Georgina (Abigail Matthews) and her 16 year brother Harry (Adam Pettigrew), she's a forthright, intelligent young woman and he's a naive optimist seduced by promises of fire and glory. Intervening is the new Lord of the Manor (David Flynn) who, with his empathy for his employees and friendly demeanour, seems like an alright sort. Tossed into the mix are a bevy of ale-swilling farmworkers, prissily moralising ladies and sturdy young future cannon fodder.

These tangled interactions form a rat's nest of subplots that range from clandestine gay relationships, falsification of medical records, hidden war crimes, the nascent women's rights movement and decades long political campaigns. Though the majority takes place during the Great War, we're soon zipping around a hundred years of history with stop-offs in the twenties, post WW2 Britain and even a brief sojourn to 2006.

Eventually, the simple significance of the titular white feather becomes buried underneath this heap of mixed messaging. Even the crucial scene where the feather delivered is treated as a footnote whereas it should be the fulcrum on which the show turns. Fortunately, though the narrative twists and turns, there's calm at the eye of the storm in the form of Georgina. You hang onto her with dear life, Abigail Matthews providing a firm, forthright performance that functions as emotional core for the play.

Matthews makes the core of the story work: a shellshocked teenage soldier being coldbloodedly executed by his superiors and his sister's battle for recognition of this crime. So it's when we head off into faintly cliched gay relationship drama that things become a bit fuzzier. Things reach the point where an out-of-the-blue final act confession of lesbian love between two minor character draws titters of disbelieving laughter from the audience, which I doubt was the intended outcome. The upshot is that The White Feather often feels less like its exploring history and more like its using the period setting as a springboard for contemporary social concerns (a smattering of contemporary sounding dialogue not helping).

This isn't a complete death knell, but it does underline both a lack of focus and intellectual rigour. For example, you'd expect a show that condemns the practise of young men being suckered into a pointless war to have a great deal to say about patriotism, worship of the military and the morality of killing because you're instructed to.Now, The White Feather does briefly touch upon these things, but skims across the surface in mini-speeches that feel airlifted into an increasingly melodramatic relationship drama.

Despite all this, the show can at least boast a couple of decent tunes. The sly irony of We Buried A Good Man Today is well-performed and decently written, with just the right amount of cold-blooded dark humour. Similarly, True Suffolk Man hits a relaxingly bucolic charm that goes a long way towards establishing tone and atmosphere. But it's the centrepiece, Set Them In Stone, that most impresses. It's a moving, solemn plea to honour those shot for desertion or pilloried for conscientious objection, and it's by far the best number in the show.

Another string to The White Feather's bow is a decent (if not mindblowingly amazing) cast. Particular kudos to Katie Brennan's forthright proto-feminist Edith, zapping every scene she's in with energy and sly humour. Also of note is Christopher Blades', whose various roles believably conjure up the wider world behind the central drama, always adding a sprinkling of gravitas to whatever scene he's in.

Ultimately The White Feather just about squeaks into success. Though it constantly fumbles the ball, at least it's fumbling the right ball. All too often there's a tendency for shows to sentimentalise World War 1, or worse, exploit it for patriotism. The White Feather recognises that the war was a crime, with the civilians of Britain manipulated towards violent deaths for no clear reason. For that alone it's a worthwhile endeavour. I just wish it was a bit more focussed.

★★★

The White Feather is at the Union Theatre until 17 October 2015. Tickets here.

My interview with renowned German fashion photographer Werner Pawlok for the British Journal of Photography:

"Werner Pawlok’s Cuba is curiously melancholy. Though his interiors pop with primary colours, golden sunlight and the scuffmarks of generations, they’re all infused with gentle sadness.

Life in Cuba is changing: as the country’s relationship with the United States begins to normalise, decades of economic restrictions are beginning to ease. Now Pawlok, who’s been photographing the country since 2004, has returned for a new series of photographs exclusively for LUMAS gallery, Mayfair, London, in advance of the exhibition Viva Cuba!, opening this September."

Click here for the full article at BJP-Online.

I've got no time for haters when it comes to the Rose Playhouse. An original Elizabethan-era theatre, it was considered lost to time before being rediscovered during building work in 1989. Now the remains lie in stygian gloom beneath a steel and glass multi-story monstrosity. It's an incredibly evocative place: frozen solid in winter and chilly even in the height of summer, the vast room dominated by a pool of still water that protects the archaeological remains. It's hardly surprising that it's described as "one of the weirdest sights in London".

All the best productions I've seen here exploit this unique performance space, and Rebecca Rogers'Reckless joins them. This is the tale of a nameless weatherbeaten island and the frayed lives of its inhabitants, particularly a relationship between father and son. Long ago their wife and mother drowned, leaving the father riddled with paranoia at the thought losing his beloved son. Consequentially he keeps a close eye on him, scolding him whenever he strays close to the crashing foam. Yet the arrival of a bright-eyed, pretty young girl entrances the son, and the two lovebirds make plans to leave the island.

This is a one hour, one-act narrative crewed with familiar archetypes, making Reckless less about character complexity and more about atmosphere and symbolism.For the latter, the show does an impress job of creating a dangerous coastline under the busy London streets. Seagulls caw and swooping down to snatch at the characters' lunches; the beam of a lighthouse swooshes across the stage; and effective sound design builds scenery in the mind's eye - you can almost smell the tang of salt in the air.

Helping matters is that while Reckless' community is quickly sketched what we see comes tinged with authenticity. Mid-way through the play we observe a village ceremony where the inhabitants each bring a picture of a loved one who's died at sea. They explain that for this one night they dredge the drowned from the deep and ensure that their memory will live in. Moments like these give this community gravitas - no small achievement considering the brevity of the play and the small cast.

As far symbolism goes, Carl Jung once said "The sea is my favourite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives." Roger's writing feeds into this, using showing individuals in awe of a vast uncharted emptiness, their actions entirely informed by the effect of the ocean upon them. Ideas like these are incredibly potent in the soft, malleable, clay textures of the Rose, where the soft lighting makes Elizabethan ghosts flit from the corner of your eyes. Within the narrative we draw parallels between scenery and character - the forlorn wreck of a warship beached on the coast mirrors the once-proud father's depression and gloom, and the artificial gaze of the lighthouse dovetails with the presentation of the lighthouse keeper as an interloper.

It's in this dreamy, free-associative haze that Reckless works best - a kind of woozy meditation on passion, paranoia and loss guided by the fourth-wall busting writer/director/actor Rebecca Rogers as the harbourmaster. The broad dramatic strokes feel like they're aligning with the Rose's typical fare - resurrections of obscure Elizabethan plays and manipulations of ancient Greek drama.

But though she succeeds in controlling tone and atmosphere, Reckless isn't without its flaws. Billed as 90 minutes long, I was a little confused when it ended after just an hour - and just when it was getting interesting! There's lots dramatic territory left unexplored - we never get to see the emotional timebombs that stud the drama go off. Similarly, there's the somewhat vestigial character of the lighthouse keeper, who appears to be the quasi-villain of the tale but feels crowbarred in.

It's difficult to wholeheartedly recommend Reckless. Granted, it does a great job of establishing tone and place - Rogers is clearly a writer/performer with talent to spare. Similarly the cast are uniformly good, though no-one exactly stands out as mindblowingly amazing. But, walking out,I felt like I'd only seen Act 1. This is a promising skeleton, but desperately in need of musculature.

★★★

Reckless is at the Rose Playhouse until 27 September 2015. Tickets here.

Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson is a tremendous feat of writing. A key piece in the postwar 'Theatre of the Absurd', it's about a Professor giving an extended lesson to a bright-eyed young pupil. Other than the occasional intervention of the Professor's maid the entire play consists of this lecture, which grows increasingly bizarre. Covering arithmetic and philology, the Professor's tangled explanations and theorising quickly becomes a thicket of brain-numbing non-sequiturs and ludicrous pronouncements - all presented with rock-sold authoritarian confidence.

It's an excellent choice for a fringe production: reliant on dialogue rather than whizz-bangery and with malleable enough edges to allow for creative production design. First impressions are excellent, this is a visually striking set made a bedraggled carpet with test-tubes of dry paint suspended from the ceiling. Fishing line demarcates the boundaries of the stage, causing little silvery lines to flit in and out of view as the air moves around the room. Staged in the round, the set feels a bit like a boxing ring - entirely appropriate given the adversarial nature of the play. Designers Audrey Guo, Frances Jialu Chen and Tan Hua should be proud of themselves.

Similar levels of quality are found in Kelly Blaze's squeakily vulnerable pupil. Brimming over with eager nervous energy, she manipulates the audience with Shirley Temple cuteness layered with subtly dark strands. Her initial interactions with the Professor feel like Red Riding Hood meeting the wolf: innocence versus predatory hunger. As the play progresses the character becomes increasingly uncomfortable - suffering a painful toothache that eventually envelopes her body. In straightforward performative terms, Blaze sells the hell out this - running through 30ish minutes of agonised wriggling with ease.

All of the above is ace and would ordinarily comprise the bedrock of an excellent piece of fringe theatre. Sadly this is not to be, as this production of The Lesson is entirely ruined by one element: Toby Osmond's Professor.

First thing's first: he kept forgetting his lines. Now I'll give a tiny bit of leeway on this, the Professor role in The Lesson has the vast majority of the dialogue to the point where the play is essentially one long monologue. On top of that, it's a Byzantine, repetitive monologue that constantly loops around itself. Then again, Osmond is a professional, trained actor and learning complex parts is, y'know, his job.

Anyway, I can forgive the occasional memory misfire - it happens to the best - but seven or eight in one performance? Not helping at all is that rather than working around the problem and improvising until he picks up the thread (which Ionescu's style of dialogue gives you scope to do) he pauses, breaks character and tetchily shouts "Line?" at the stage manager. This is an intense piece of drama made of subtle rhythms and mounting tension - all spoiled by these constant gaffes.

But even when he remembers his lines Osmond is terrible. Wooden as all hell, he recites rather than performs the role, not sounding remotely convinced of anything he's saying. This is the key to the Professor's character - delivering stentorian gobbledegook as if it's the most obvious thing in the world, and it's utterly bungled.

There's also zero tonal progression to his performance. The dramatic curve of the play is such that, at least in the first few interactions between Professor and pupil, this could be a vaguely naturalistic bit of teaching. Ideally, as the drama ramps up and the pupil's grows ever more distressed, the Professor role should dovetail with it - growing monstrous as she shrinks in fear. Osmond doesn't do this, from minute one locking into a single tone, style of delivery and set of mannerisms that he maintains without change for the duration. It's a sad indictment of a performance when the closest an actor comes to communicating character development is taking his shirt off.

This production feels designed to impress. The creative team are all recent graduates from China now working in London and it's clear that no small amount of their blood and sweat have been poured into The Lesson. Similarly, the performances of Kelly Blaze and Roslyn Hill's (even in a minor role) are easily to the standard of the London stage. Toby Osmond's isn't: he's not only unprepared but unable to perform this role to a satisfactory degree and singlehandedly ruins what would otherwise have been a decent show.

★★

The Lesson is at the Drayton Arms Theatre until the 26th of September. Tickets here.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the pitch for The Corpse of Anna Fritz. A world-famous young starlet unexpectedly dies. Her body is held in a hospital morgue where an orderly snaps a photo of her and sends it to his friends. They turn up eager for a peek, ogling her naked body and squeezing her breasts. Then one of them suggests having sex with the corpse, pointing out that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Sure she's growing a bit pungent, but after all, Anna Fritz is a celebrity...

It's probably safe to say that The Corpse of Anna Fritz isn't destined for mainstream success. This marks another entry in the mercifully limited necrophilia subgenre, alongside esteemed classics like the shiver-inducing NEKromantik series and the major league barminess of 1973's Love Me Deadly. These films set out to shock (and they succeed), yet simply freaking an audience out is like shooting fish in a barrel. So it's refreshing that Vicens uses necrophilia as a springboard for political and social comment.

The three men at the centre of the story - a hospital orderly and his two friends - are various degrees of moronically macho, yet instantly recognisable. Early in the film they cockily evaluate women in the hospital waiting room for 'fuckability', boasting that they could persuade a Chinese student to get breast implants and pimp her out. They're detestable creatives, yet their behaviour and dialogue is instantly recognisable: "Whey, mad bantz!"

This proves to be the tip of an iceberg of misogyny that this film explores and subtly satirises. From the garbled crackle of scene-setting news radio over the opening credits we learn of Fritz's life. World-famous movie star, international jet-setter, fashion icon and model - she sits atop the Mount Olympus of celebrity. Ordinarily, to men like our leads, she's practically divine, existing only as a fantasy. Even before the events of the film begin men (and men like them) have reduced Anna Fritz to a dislocated, impersonal sex object, something entirely separate to her as human being.

This makes their arousal when confronted with her newly-dead corpse weirdly understandable. Like Pavlov's dogs they've been socially conditioned to lust after beautiful, passive and submissive women, making Fritz's corpse utterly irresistible: a three-dimensional, tactile masturbatory aid. Ironically, even while dead she feels more 'alive' than the porn that's warped their minds. That their lust is vaguely comprehensible layers the film with pitch-black satire: Vicens concluding that unashamedly raping corpses is the logical endpoint of 21st century masculinity.

This is neat stuff and for a decent portion of the film Vicens is onto a winner, weaving together sociology and nausea-inducing horror into an uncomfortable yet satisfying watch. Yet, sadly, the film eventually degenerates into a conventional Hitchcockian suspense thriller composed of largely predictable narrative beats.

It's not that the film becomes bad, just that it turns into a decently constructed genre flick, which is a bit disappointing after the promise of the first act. Even so it looks great throughout, making much of the cool pallor of cold fluorescent light on skin and the textures of sterilised white tiles and grimily industrial hospital machinery. The performances are also top notch, with Christian Valencia's scumbag extraordinaire Ivan standing out as a particularly hateful asshole who deserves every inch of his comeuppance. Even Alba Ribas impresses as the titular corpse. Playing a dead body doesn't sound like the most promising of roles, yet she puts in an honest-to-god performance rather than just being a prop.

I can't deny enjoying The Corpse of Anna Fritz, though it didn't turn out to be the corpse sex film I'd hoped for. I love bold cinema that careens through taboos and explores seriously bizarre territory, especially when it's shot with as much panache as this is. Sadly it can't quite stick the landing, settling for genre competence rather than properly going off the deep end. Still, its mouldy, slowly rotting heart is in the right place.

★★★

The Corpse of Anna Fritz is at the London Film Festival on 7th and 8th October. Tickets here.

It's 2043 and life is shit. Britain has finally gone full dystopia, just as we somehow always knew it would. Building upon the stratified society of the 2010s, this future is sharply divided between the haves and have nots. In the haves camp is Bea (Cathryn Sherman), a septuagenarian living the a gilded life in a luxury flat. Representing the have-nots is Abi (Rebecca Pryle), a poverty-stricken yet fiercely intelligent young woman trying to scrape together the money to get into university and study medicine.

The best and most lucrative way for her to achieve this lies in her veins. Young, healthy blood is a valued commodity for the elderly rich, staving off senility and wrinkles. And so, cannula firmly wedged into her arm, Abi pays periodic visits to the "vampire" Bea, siphoning blood into her creaky veins.

Writer Emma Gibson's future a chillingly plausible one. Recent experiments conducted on mice, suggest that old mice that receive infusions of young blood experience a burst of brain cell growth. Also, as birth rates decline and life expectancy increases, the average age in Britain will begin to skew upwards, meaning the young will increasingly have to work in service of a creaky elderly population. We already live in a baby boomer housing market, where fixation on property value keeps prices unaffordably high for young buyers.

More broadly, Gibson's future is a logical extension of the free market capitalism so enthusiastically espoused by modern Conservatives. She shows us a world where everything has become a commodity, from the blood in your veins to your sexual organs to the organs in your body (valued by shifty body parts dealer Caleb (Sam Wilkinson)). Layered on top of this is a world of classist privilege, where the working class are forced into menial jobs to serve the bourgeoisie and gently steered away from education and jobs.

As a political statement Bloodletting is blunt. It's allegorical future all but beats you about the head with references (among others) to the modern state of the NHS, sincere criticism of the Conservative government and tuition fees. Characters occasionally break into didactic speeches that so nakedly convey the writer's politics they may as well start using Powerpoint slides.

But you know what? I'm fine with that. Subtlety is all well and good, but sometimes you need to beat an audience over the head with your point. There's a thrilling unadulterated rage in this play, which has no time for pretentious allusions. This is writing a play like firing a gun, something also felt in its brevity. At a scanty 50 minutes, Bloodletting says what it wants to say without any faffing around and I respect that.

Bloodletting's political prescience is the best thing about the play. Everything else is... alright. Though the world Gibson creates is plausible, her dialogue is a bit thinly written with a couple of seriously groanworthy moments. Clumsily exposited in the first couple of scenes is the existence of a mutated HIV, all but guaranteed to kill within five years of contracting it. Given that the heroine prides herself on the purity of her blood, you can probably see where this one is going. Even so, it's difficult to suppress a cringe when she exclaims "You've infected me with HIV-M!"

The writing deficits are exacerbated by performances that settle at competent. Best is Cathryn Sherman's Bea, who mixes up a cocktail of casual superiority, class guilt and self-disgust that serves ther character well. Pryle and Sherman are a slight step down; Abi's frustrated intelligence and despair isn't communicated particularly effectively; and Sherman makes the most of an extremely broadly sketched character.

This isn't any great shakes in staging either. I don't want to criticise too much on this, as there's obviously budget constraints at play. That said, a couple of tables and chairs don't particularly evoke a nightmare future.

For all these flaws, I dug Bloodletting. That it works at all is entirely down to the righteous indignation that fuels the writing. Clearly cathartic for Gibson, the play intelligently diagnoses what's wrong with society and stands as a stark warning of the ideologies of selfishness, commodification and classism. Sure it's a little creakily constructed, but I'd rather see a creaky play with something to say than a glitzy big-budget void.

★★★

The Ice Bar is cool.

Yes, yes, that might be the shittest pun I've ever made but it really is dead cool. Ordinarily I'd find myself in natural opposition to a novelty bar in the moneyed heart of Mayfair that costs £15 get into. Frankly, the simple act of hanging out in these swanky places gives me unpleasant guilty shivers. Y'know, I don't want to literally be a champagne socialist. Even so, I can't deny that a bar where damn near everything is made of ice isn't a super fun to hang out.

On entering you're encouraged to don an insulating poncho with a furred hood, complete with extremely warm gloves. This proves to be good advice, even the glasses that they serve the booze in are made of ice (fortunately they don't appear to glue themselves onto your lips). The ice bar concept isn't entirely new (I remember seeing something similar in awful Bond film Die Another Day), but still, simply being there and watching the way light moves through these gigantic chunks of ice is aesthetically pleasing.

The place goes through changes of theme every so often, the new one being rock-themed. With cocktails named Comfortably Numb and November Rain (etc etc) it's a bit Hard Rock Cafe, but at least this allows them to exhibit two gigantic ice sculpted skulls that you can pose inside. Indeed, much of the interior seems designed to encourage visitors to snap photos of them and their friends enjoying the novelty surroundings. In one corner there's a throne to perch on, in another an ice drum-kit to pose behind - I'm unable to resist taking a couple of snaps myself - after all when on earth am I ever going to see this much ice again?

Given that it's literally freezing you can't spend all night hanging out here. Eventually your toes begin to tingle and fingers go numb (even through the gloves). I had a chat to the warmly wrapped up barman (apparently enjoying himself despite hailing from balmy southern Italy), who explained they have tightly regulated lengths on their shifts, ensuring they don't end up frozen solid.. After all, alcohol, dancing and insulated ponchos can only stave off the cold for so long. But as you step back into the warmer real world it feels stimulating and fresh, a bit like enjoying a reverse sauna.

As a one-off novelty the Ice Bar is genuinely fun. Unless you're a homesick penguin it's unlikely to end up as your local, but if you're looking for something to add a bit of chilly fizz and crackle to a special night out you could do a lot worse.

Ice Bar is at 31-33 Heddon Street, W1B 4BN

London City Nights was invited to a promotional event hosted by Ice Bar, and provided with free food and drink.

Beasts of No Nation spends two hours showing us the physical and moral degradation of an innocent child. It's violent, politically uncomfortable and deeply disturbing cinema that goes places most studios wouldn't. Despite this, it's also a downright beautiful, exciting and thematically seductive story that reels you in and spits you out.

Set in an unnamed African nation, we find ourselves in just another day in an anonymous every-war. A vaguely defined government battles against even more fuzzily defined guerrilla rebels. Caught in the 'buffer zone' is Agu (Abraham Attah), a young boy in a respected local family. Refugees from the battlefield trickle through his village each day, his father having set aside land to temporarily house them.

This oasis vanishes when soldiers arrive and indiscriminately massacre the terrified villagers. With Agu's family dead the terrified boy runs into the bush, where he's eventually captured by the otherwise un-named Commandant (Idris Elba). He's cruel, unhinged and sadistic, yet brims over with magnetic charisma, his battalion worshipping him as their collective father. Like a moth to a flame Agu is drawn to him, quickly becoming a murderous, drugged out child soldier bereft of conscience.

It makes for compelling viewing, largely because Fukunaga isn't afraid to portray the initial stages of Agu's transformation as romantic and exciting. This turns out to be a sly perversion of the Campbellian hero's journey: the orphaned child going on a quest under the tutelage of a wiser father figure and ending up transformed. Yet while the Campbellian hero saves the day and evolves into a wise, competent and fully-rounded adult, Agu ends up a hollow-eyed shell having achieved nothing.

That Fukunaga adheres so closely to these archetypes while simultaneously inverting them screws with audience expectations. On reading a synopsis you'd expect to despise the Elba character - perhaps associating him with hazy memories of Kony 2012. Yet despite all the moral and physical horrors his character wreaks, Elba imbues the role with so much raw charisma that we can't help but find ourselves in thrall to him. It sounds sick, but you can understand why people would follow his orders and abandon their conscience.

Elba's performance is elevated by woozily psychedelic cinematography that turns the warzone into a hyper-real, oversaturated dreamworld. This (in combination with intentionally disorientating editing) conveys the effect of the amphetamines and cannabis that the soldiers constantly take. It's a suffocating bad trip, bullets whizzing past the camera, screams, grass distorted to deep reds and constant random acts of background brutality. This is all scored by an excellent synth-led score by Dan Romer and results in a kind of cinematic sensory overload.

There's more than a sprinkling of Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line here, especially during Abu's monotone, philosophic voice-over. But it doesn't feel much like Fukunaga is ripping off Malick so much as he's playing with the same tool-set; deconstructing the imagery and emotions of war movies to understand what's going on in their character's heads. This psychological focus echoes Fukunaga's work on True Detective, which also has as much time for the protagonist's psychology as it does the narrative.

None of this would work without a rock-solid central performance, something Abraham Attah more than delivers. I don't know who discovered this young actor, but they deserve some kind of award for unearthing new talent. He's brilliant from minute one, as credible as a bright-eyed mischievous child as he is a burnt out AK-47 wielding psychopath. As good as Elba is (i.e. really good), his performance largely works because we can sense the awe in Attah's face when the two interact.

Beasts is the first film acquired for distribution by Netflix and seeing their logo projected across a cinema screen is a slightly surreal experience. Yet if Beasts is anything to go by the company is going to shake things up a bit. It's a depressing thing to note, but the fact that the film features no white characters (even in incidental roles) would probably make it untouchable by major studios. But Netflix, swimming in cash and with a pre-paid subscription audience, can afford to take 'risks'.

And thank god they did, because Beasts of No Nation is a damn fine piece of cinema. From the sound design, the costuming, the editing, set design and location scouting everything is top notch. It feels like the first proper shoe-in for a boatload of award nominations, particularly for Elba and Attah's performances. Best of all, it's going to be streaming to all Netflix subscribers in a couple of weeks. It's a must watch.

★★★★

Beasts of No Nation is available for streaming (and released in Curzon cinemas) on 16 October 2015

Though 11 years old, Daniel Dipper's Flush has stood the test of time. Set in a contemporary London the play charts the tangled lives of some unpleasant young urbanites, all filtered through the prism of poker. The game is a constant presence; chips clattering across a coffee table and cards are shuffled and flipped. Quickly we realise that these characters are probing one another, searching for chinks in their emotional armour and exploiting them for all they're worth.

With a chronologically cut-up narrative and scant regard for the fourth wall, Flush encourages its audience to play detective. From the off we understand that dark acts lurk at the heart of the play, yet who they're committed by and to remains vague. None of the characters are very attractive people; being variously sweaty losers, sadistic lotharios, sociopaths or sadistically violent drug abusing headcases.

Regardless, these reprobates are the cards the audience is dealt, and we try our best to shuffle our hand into some kind of recognisable order. The constant spout of revelations act as the flop; working out who's fucking over whom and which character is going to end up as the chump.

Despite the fact that we're gazing into a moral abyss, it's impressive how darkly funny these characters can be. Shane Wheeler's Charlie stands out as able to get away with saying the most brutal dialogue (for example, gleefully describing the rape and murdering a teenage) and getting a guilty giggle from the audience. Both character and performer successfully take refuge in audacity; his stories grow ever more perverse and bizarre the more we like him.

Also fun (though in a different way) is Grant Reeves' city boy Cupid. Without one word of dialogue we understand who is; his slicked back hair and chunkily expensive diver's speaking volumes. The character exudes predatory dangerousness, combining feline good looks with something cold and calculating. There's a scene where he reflexively seduces another character's girlfriend, successfully going through the motions as if it's just something he does.

All five actors eventually expose their character's dark hearts; all showing their hands as their secrets are splurged across the stage. It's all pretty compelling drama, if only to hear what atrocity they're going to concoct next. Sometimes there's a sense that this is being written to shock: a particularly eyebrow-raising moment being when one character is being needled by another about his unfaithful girlfriend, but reassures himself by "remembering when his sister got raped." Woah nelly! None more black! Mega-darrrrrk!

Moments like these belie a slight immaturity in the writing, but I don't really mind a punkish desire to rattle a few cages - at least the play never gets boring. Helping matters is that at a svelte 50 minutes the play zips along at a impressive rate.

Consequentiall, there's little stagecraft involved and perfunctory set-design, but smart music design goes a long way towards creating atmosphere. To some, opening with almost the entirety of Smashmouth's mid-90s hit Walking on the Sun will say everything about the characters and events to follow.

Flush is a pretty damn good piece of fringe theatre and a promising debut for Break Point Theatre. It doesn't over-reach, doesn't waste the audience's time and has no qualms about morality and prudery. Best of all the show has the good sense to just let these actors have fun with their roles, all of whom are played with obvious relish. Not the most ambitious night of theatre about, but a worthwhile one nonetheless.

★★★

Flush is at the Etcetera Theatre until 4th October. Tickets here.

I properly laughed once during Nobody's Business. A dog has been mistaken for a person; resulting in this exchange:

"So what is she?"

"She's a Boxer."

"... amateur or professional?"

It's a solid joke, delivered well to boot. It also proves to be the only unambiguously successful gag all evening. There are few things worse than an unfunny comedy, one-liners greeted by uncomfortable silences as the actors' eyes flicker around the audience searching for a smile. Nobody's Business isn't the most unfunny comedy I've ever sat through but it's pretty bad, settling roughly at the level of unsuccessful-mid-90s-teatime-sitcom-pilot-episode.

Set in a shabby complex of rented offices, we follow the variable fortunes of Hugo Roth (Tristan Beint), whose talents lie in negotiating EU bureaucracy and securing development grants for inventors. Despite projecting a go-getter image he's down on his luck, parasitically attached to his artist girlfriend Imogen (Claire Jeater) and pressed for rent by office landlords Howard (Stephen Oswald) and Sybil (Katy Manning). But there's light at the end of the tunnel in the form of inventor Neville (Jeremy Drakes), who's brainchild is a collapsible motorised shopping trolley that becomes known as the "Shop-a-doodle-doo".

Ordinarily I'd give Nobody's Business a vicious critical kicking, but instead I find myself pitying it. After all, the cast does their utmost to wring every molecule of comedy out of Sylvia Freedman's script. It's obvious that Tristan Beint is a talented comedy actor, but his posturing, pompous character is a diluted, dusty old archetype. To various degrees this applies to the rest of the cast, who we watch futilely grapple with paper-thin characterisation and duff dialogue. Katy Manning comes out best, primarily because she throws herself around the stage with infectiously enthusiastic gusto (though she should give it some welly as I suspect this whole affair is intended as a vehicle for her).

But you can't really overlook that none of this is particularly funny. Everything is suffused with safe, inoffensive humour; jokes about curried beans making you fart; people with foreign accents yelling angrily; or a man burning his bum on a barbecue. Not exactly helping is that one of the characters is called Sybil (with her name being loudly yelled throughout the story). You can't help but think of Fawlty Towers - a comparison by which even a genuinely funny play would suffer.

Even the non-comedy portions don't make a huge deal of sense. A smattering: Imogen and Hugo, are supposed to be a long term relationship with (we are told) a surprisingly good sex-life, yet there's zero chemistry between them to the point that they may as well be strangers. Similarly, the convoluted relationship between the two landlords/owners/concierges of the building is never satisfyingly outlined. Even the MacGuffin at the centre of the story, the motorised, compact shopping cart, is a poor choice of invention. The dialogue keeps extolling its qualities, but it's obvious that this dowdy prop isn't going to actually do anything surprising.

Individually none of these flaws would be disastrous, but in combination with the moribund gags and two hour running time it adds up to a dull theatrical experience. I'll grant that maybe, given how confusingly popular terrible sitcoms can be, material like this does have a home. But it's not here; in comparison to the King's Head Theatre's usual fare Nobody's Business is stodgy, old-fashioned and not very funny.

★★

Nobody's Business is at the King's Head Theatre until 24th October. Tickets here.

Every entry to 5 Guys Chillin' comes with a free johnny and pouch of lube. This is a suitable harbinger to a show that communicates a dizzyingly varied amount of ways for guys to stick their dicks in one another.

Aside from the obvious (anal, oral etc), we get detailed descriptions of bondage slings, watersports, fisting and even a multi-man merry-go-round spit roasting device. This is all couched in a woozy narcotic soup; nostrils tingling with the buzz of mandy, coke-addled brains twitching to life and teeth grinding to dust under the loving eyes of tina.

The titular '5 Guys' (all un-named) are played by Elliot Hadley, Tom Holloway, Damien Hughes, Michael Matrovski and Shri Patel. We meet them as they prepare to embark on a 'chill'; a lengthy fucking and drugs session in one of their flats. Shorn of a clear narrative, the 80 minute play is composed of; lengthy discussions in orgy etiquette (don't spend all night on your phone, don't gobble all the host's Viagra, don't invite friends over without asking); the ethics of STD infections and HIV transmission in group sex; a paean to recreational drug use; and the most outrageous stories each of them has.

Taken as a straight play this avalanche of hedonism would quickly become tiring. But 5 Guys Chilling is verbatim theatre - i.e. the script is composed of extracts from interviews. This allows the play to sidestep accusations of sensationalism and claim verisimilitude in documenting a the chemsex gay subculture.

Even so, there comes a moment about half-way when the pervy fun of watching fit gay guys cavorting around in harnesses and zip-up jock-straps starts to wear a bit thin. It's like getting used to a hot bath, and you get a bit blase as you watch yet anotherround of spit n' thrust buggery. But mid-way through there's a subtle change of gear as the physical thrills of stimulants and sex begin to take their toll.

One of the most successful moments is a touching monologue from Shri Patel about what it's like to be a gay Pakistani. Drawing back to more emotionally sincere territory, he explains that as his parent's only son there are incredibly strong societal pressures on him to get married, have children and take care of his elderly parents. Combining a vigorously active sex life with a traditional Muslim marriage sounds next to impossible, making his guide through this deadly (sadly probably literally) minefield utterly fascinating.

All the characters get these moments of sober honesty. We hear about times when things got too heavy even for these bold sexual pioneers. Being trussed up in a sling in a bondage club and then gang-raped; threatened at knife-point in your own home by a meth-addled psycho; your attention span shrinking as drugs mushify your mind; even the straightforward loss of intimacy and excitement that comes from indulging in pleasure to the exclusion of all else.

By the time the curtain falls the five men have become burnt out zombies. One man's face is smeared with blood, his mucous membranes having finally collapsed under a crystallised onslaught. Two more are blank-faced zoned out on the sofa, spikes dangling from their veins. Another is pale-faced and hunched, rocking back and forth, next to the motionless body of someone recovering from a seizure.

It's a painfully accurate dramatisation of how drug-induced euphoria contrasts with the inevitable comedown, when you've finally exhausted your serotonin reserves and your muscles ache from overexertion. But 5 Guys Chilling isn't ending on a note of condemnation, but with the intelligent, truthful portrayal of the effects of excess. Perhaps most notably, it leaves the audience to judge whether the highs are worth the crushing lows.

I've got to admit, for the first twenty to thirty minutes I had some reservations. I suspected that whatever substance there was to the play was in service of providing several good-looking nearly naked young men for the primarily gay male audience to ogle. I also found it initially lacking in comparison to the King's Head's recent production of Fucking Men, which successfully wove sexual thrills into social commentary.

Fortunately the gradual shift in tone towards introspection and consequences won me over. On a basic level it's refreshing to see theatre so at ease with sexuality and drug use, leaving prudery firmly at the stage door. But importantly, 5 Guys Chilling not only entertained but informed (teaching me some interesting things about non-detectable HIV transmission rates).

It'd be all too easy to stage a paper-thin, cock-hardeningly-pornographic exploration of this subculture. But 5 Guys Chilling goes deeper asking what it really means to be a 21st century libertine.

★★★★

5 Guys Chilling is at the King's Head Theatre until 24 October. Tickets here.

Rarely have I seen a man look as relieved as Paul Murphy at the end of Valhalla. 48 hours prior this production had been turned on its head with the unexpected departure of the leading man. And so at very short notice Murphy, the playwright, stepped in. It sounds foolhardy - how can you substitute for someone who's spent weeks rehearsing, develop a chemistry with your co-star and act around an on-stage copy of the script? It's the theatrical equivalent of a high-wire act sans safety net.

But here we are, watching an actor fly by the seat of his pants and, remarkably, it works. Helping is that Valhalla is a very strong piece of theatre. Set in a near-future where society has begun to collapse after a devastating global epidemic, we follow a couple, known only as Man (Paul Murphy) and Woman (Carolina Main). This crisis has exacerbated fault-lines in their marriage; he's working hard on curing the disease and she's struggling to conceive. In desperation they abandon the mainland to work from a remote house in Iceland, sequestering themselves away to concentrate on his research.

Though we spend the entirety of the play inside one sterile, brightly lit room, we're conscious of the massive Icelandic environment outside. Volcanoes bubble and hiss, thousand tonne glaciers creep and crack through valleys and fierce winds whip around the buildings. Something massive and primordial is bearing down on these two scientists: the weight of mythology banging on the doors and warping their lives. Sat in an empirical tower of reason, Man ignores these psychic reverberations while Woman begins to embrace them, with disturbing consequences.

From the off, Valhalla launches into a staccato rhythm that keeps audiences on their toes. Scenes are short and end abruptly with a blackout and musical sting that marks each minor cliffhanger and emotional revelation. The effect is that we watch two people gradually becoming unspun; each time the lights go up they've imperceptibly changed in subtle ways. By the time we reach the closing scenes they've both come a long way yet maintain the personalities and desires they had when we first met them. Theatre like this requires two rock-solid performances; the play would like a badly mixed souffle if one of the leads weren't up to snuff.

Thankfully both Murphy and Main are excellent. Somewhat aided by his character being a scientist who constantly reads his research papers, for the most part he gets away with having the script on stage. Naturally it's not an ideal way to perform, but I'd much rather suspend my disbelief than have an actor forget his lines and have to be prompted. Main, opposite him, is straightforwardly excellent. There's an electric wildness to her movements, a twitchy awkwardness that feels a little bit like a caged animal. Given that she's playing 'Woman', it's appropriate that her performance runs a gamut of femininity, layering elements of maternity, eroticism, professionalism and empathy. Simply put, she's dead fun to watch.

As events progress, the themes of the play tend towards confrontation. On the narrative surface is the conflict between the two characters. Just a little deeper lie broader dichotomies; man vs woman, science vs superstition, civilisation vs nature and so on. Eventually we zero in on questions of medical ethics, with a neat thematic dovetailing of disfiguring experiments and ancient Norse punishments.

This knotty ball of meaning climaxes in an ending that's surprising, joyous and slightly scary all at once. I won't spoil it here, but with perfect timing the director shocks the audience by turning out expectations of the form of the play on its head. It's brill.

Despite suffering a backstage nightmare, Valhalla is an unreserved success. It slots neatly into Theatre 503's growing catalogue of smartly symbolic, beautifully staged and fantastically performed plays, making it an easy recommendation. But special praise must go to Paul Murphy, who singlehandedly rescued the production by bravely putting himself in front of an audience at short notice. It could have gone so, so wrong. But it didn't. He deserves his applause.

★★★★

Valhalla is at Theatre 503 until 24 October. Tickets here.

Whether you're after hetero-vanilla glossy L.A. action or furtive brown-bag fetish ultraporn Madame Roxy's Erotic Emporium has you covered. Snugly nestled in a Soho back alley, the bulging shelves showcase a kaleidoscope of fetishes, from cheeky uniform kink to pregnancy porn to scat to snuff. If you're looking for toys, there's paddles, butt-plugs, vibrators - even an autodildonic motorised fuck-throne! There's even a peep show theatre in the basement, complete with the standard stained carpets and reams of tissue.

Truly Madame Roxy's is everything anyone could ever want in a sex shop.

A felt sex shop anyway.

Madame Roxy's is the latest project from one of my favourite artists, felt-wrangler extraordinaire Lucy Sparrow. I first saw her the 2013 Whitecross Street Festival, where her felt Rose West in the style Andy Warhol was drawing loud abuse from angry passers by. I figured any artist whose work inspires public threats to burn it is someone to pay attention to.

Sparrow really hit the big time with last year's Cornershop, recreating the contents of a local newsagent entirely from felt. All the big media cheeses weighed in, from The Daily Mail to Buzzfeed. Open for the summer, it was impressive in every regard, from the inspiration to the effort to the execution. At the time I wondered how Sparrow was going to top it - surely she's taken felt just about as far as it can go?

Not even close. Madame Roxy's is a quantum leap forward in felt - a punky, political, precision constructed art experience - something that makes the mind boggle the moment you step inside. Though made of felt, the shop has an instant verisimilitude - so much so that, on the first day of opening, an embarrassed businessman crept inside and tried to buy Viagra, the staff having to carefully explain that this is an art installation and not an actual sex shop.

First and most obviously, seeing graphic sexual acts rendered in fabric is funny. Felt is inherently unthreatening; recalling primary school arts and crafts or grandmotherly Christmas presents. A buttplug, normally plastic, shiny and rubbery, becomes huggable, the spanking paddles more likely to tickle a partner than sting them. Sparrow takes the invitingly tactile quality of felt as far towards perversion as it's possible to go; even felt watersports rendered in gold glitterpen and 'Vomit Vixens' ("The most revolting centrefold EVER!") land on just the right side of sweet.

It'd be easy to stop there, but scattered amongst the shelves are works that seriously prick an audience's liberal consciences. "Some like it Hot.. Some Like it Sweet.. Some like it VIOLENT" depicts a man strangling a naked woman, "Snuff films presents: DEATH BY BEHEADING" shows two men slitting a young girl's throat and, in the most disturbing one I spotted, "No Legs. No Arms. Amputee Porn."appears to show a limbless, decomposing corpse.

It's in these unnerving titles that Madame Roxy's marks itself as truly special. Without them it'd be easy to level criticism that Sparrow is merely making a cute n' cuddly sex shop experience. Nobody wants to go into some bubblewrapped, self-censored fantasy slum designed for well-to-do middle classers who wouldn't dream of treading the cum-stained corridors of a genuine Soho establishment.

That reticence, coupled with the dominance of internet porn, threatens the neighbouring (not felt) sex shops with extinction. After all, these days people prefer to pleasure themselves behind locked bedroom doors rather than popping into central London and furtively stuffing a brown paper bag under their coat. In the interests of research I popped over the road from Madame Roxy's and had a nice chat with the proprietor of Up West British Adult Shop. She was over the moon with the popularity of their new neighbour and called my attention to the fact that depicting many of the sex acts on Roxy's shelves are now illegal in this country (not, apparently, in felt form)

The two interiors make for a fascinating contrast, Sparrow's furry friendliness seems all the more amusing in comparison to the sea of glistening cellophane DVD wrappers and silicone rubber phalluses. Sadly these shops are probably going the way of the dodo, stamped out by a combination of online porn and skyrocketing rents. Soho, for decades an oasis of counterculture in the heart of London, is becoming gradually crushed under the weight of luxury flats and chintzy bespoke cakeries.

Madame Roxy's reminds us that these places are a crucial part of Soho's psychological fabric - the seasoning that gives the neighourhood its distinctive atmosphere. Free from prudery, moral judgment and entirely sex positive, Madame Roxy's might be the best site-specific installation I've ever seen, ultimately the value of these establishments. It's a good thing too there's precious few people who'll publically sing their praises.

But primarily, Madame Roxy's is entertaining, hilarious and, surprisingly, often kinda arousing. There's something for every persuasion on these carefully crafted and curated shelves. It's only open for a week, so I urge you to check it out as soon as possible. There's nothing else like it in London.

Madame Roxy's is open until 17th October, 12pm-8pm.

Man Down (2015) directed by Dito Monteil (Venice Film Festival 2015)

'Blood of My Blood' (2015) directed by Marco Bellochio (Venice Film Festival 2015)

'Anomalisa' (2015) directed by Charlie Kaufman (Venice Film Festival 2015)

'Only Forever' at the Hope Theatre, 12th September 2015

'The Man Who Had All the Luck' at the King's Head Theatre, 13th September 2015

'And Then Come The Nightjars' at Theatre 503, 15th September 2015

'See What I Wanna See' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 17th September 2015

'The White Feather' at The Union Theatre, 18th September 2015

Interview with Werner Pawlok for the British Journal of Photography

'Reckless' at the Rose Playhouse, 20th September 2015

'The Lesson' at The Drayton Arms, 22nd September 2015

'The Corpse of Anna Fritz' (2015) directed by Hèctor Hernández Vicens (London Film Festival 2015)

'Bloodletting' at the Bread and Roses Theatre, 25th September 2015

'Icebar London Rocks!' at the Ice Bar, 27th September 2015

'Beasts of No Nation' (2015) directed by Cary Fukunaga (London Film Festival 2015)

'Flush' at the Etcetera Theatre, 30th September 2015

'Nobody's Business' at the King's Head Theatre, 2nd October 2015

'5 Guys Chillin' at the King's Head Theatre, 2nd October 2015

'Valhalla' at Theatre 503, 3rd October 2015

'Madame Roxy's Erotic Emporium' at the Scissorhand Barbershop, 7th October 2015