By Robert Bain

We don’t get to learn much about the taxi driver we accompany throughout Hellcab, but we all know exactly how he feels. It’s a familiar character in a familiar set-up: the cold, tired worker slogging through his last shift on Christmas Eve, before clocking off for the festive break.

Dressed in an unbuttoned plaid shirt over a T-shirt, our driver is every bit the standard straightforward good guy, not too warm on the outside, but with a heart underneath it all. He’s such an everyman, in fact, that we don’t even get to know his name.

The play, which opened last week at The Old Red Lion in Islington, is a series of short snippets in which our likeable driver takes a selection of the weird and wonderful people of Chicago to their destinations. We hear a whole string of conversations kick off with the same banal comments about the weather and the basketball game, then head off in bizarre, funny and disturbing directions.
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By Rebecca Law

For those looking for a night of entertaining musical entertainment, look no further. Consisting of only two lines of the spoken word and driven otherwise entirely by song, I Sing! does exactly what it says on the tin. For those with children however, beware – Mary Poppins, this isn’t. I Sing! would do well to come with a warning on the packet: this play contains uncomfortable moments of a kapel-clad Hebrew class teacher shamelessly dry-humping parts of the set whilst singing “Fuck me, Heidi, Fuck me” in a fit of unrequited frustration.

Discomfort aside, this is certainly a very entertaining and touching production, which follows the lives of five 20-something New Yorkers as they grapple with the uncertainty of their futures, precariously negotiating the transitory nature of love and life. I Sing! features five articulate, educated young adults whose lives intertwine in a naturally incestuous way, proving, as they say, that even somewhere like New York can be “the biggest little town”.

Before arriving in London, I Sing! had previously played in New York, Chicago and Australia, and now finds itself in the suitably intimate surroundings of the Union Theatre in Southwark, which boasts just four rows of seats. This allows the audience up close and very personal with the action, both the poignant — as cast members blow wispy tendrils of cigarette smoke into their faces — and the downright brazen, as the characters happily prance around the stage in their underwear.
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By Natalie Bennett

The parliamentary press gallery in Westminster is often accused of treating their subject as though it were a football game: points are “scored” off ministers by their shadows, attacks are “lobbed back”, you’re a member of the “team”. In Whipping It Up, which premiered last week at The Bush Theatre, writer Steve Thompson has gone further: this is politics as Machiavellian ping-pong played for laughs.

The scenario is a complicated but just believable one. It is late December, 2008. The Tories are in power, with a majority of just three. The setting is the hyper-realistically staged Whips’ Office, which has reverted to what Maggie (Fiona Glascott), the formidable Labour Chief Whip who used to call this home, calls a “a public school dorm”.

Traditional Tory voters were to be granted an early present – a bill to tax tents unashamedly aimed at the traveller community. It is designed to show them that the softie, “leftie” PM — no prizes for guessing who that is — is really one of them. But the scouts are upset, because they’ll be hit by the tax too, and then, on the morning before the vote, a farmer shoots for no reason a couple of traveller children. Suddenly, it seems, the political mood has changed, and the government is in trouble on a bill it saw as a shoo-in.
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By Robert Bain

If the idea of two hours of terror is making you jittery already, then don’t worry. Firstly, the Union Theatre lets you bring your drinks in, to calm those nerves, and secondly, Terror 2006 really isn’t that terrifying. It’s certainly entertaining though. The creators have captured that gaudy and slightly grotesque feel of old-fashioned fairgrounds and circuses, right down to the jaunty but sinister music, and creepy, unhinged characters.

This annual horror festival is now in its third year. The night consists of three short plays, two of them based on tales by renowned Victorian ghost story writer MR James. But the highlight turns out to be an interlude between the plays, in which two gypsy showmen do a quick double act involving mutilation.

It’s simple, it’s crude, but it’s really funny and it’s really horrible. The reason it works is that, like good street performers, the pair take the time to build up to what they do, so that when it happens, it seems ten times more impressive than it should.
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By Robert Bain

Boys’ Plays brings together two tales of hero worship between gay males, that leave you wondering who really had the better of whom. The two one-act plays, separately titled Boys’ Play and Extra Virgin, being produced for the first time in Europe by Shamelessboyz, combine remarkably well, flowing like two halves of one whole.

Both are not only about hero worship but also denial – Jack Heifner’s Boys’ Play focuses on two teenagers who insist they are “not queers”, while the apparently more mature characters in Howard Walters’ Extra Virgin must face up to painful secrets in their pasts during an intense one-night stand.
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By Jonathan Grant

March Twenty-Three: A man of tired, but generally respectable, appearance sits at his writing bureau. Judging by the accents and the furniture, he is somewhere in New York in the 1980s. But he could be anywhere, at any time. In front of him is his diary, his release from the world that has made him weary; these pages enable him to express his own opinions in the world that has made him powerless and mute in the face of globalisation’s irresistible force.

In the corner of the room is a small television. CBS News’ Dan Rather is espousing terror; the kind that is the heartbeat pumping money-green blood around consumer economies. Together with the radio on his desk, these media form the window out of which this man looks at the world. There is a curtain-covered pane of glass in the backdrop, but this is used only to spy on his neighbours’ unusual habits.

This is a man clearly at odds with the world, and his place in it. But as the days unravel and the diary entries, which provide the narrative to our story, accumulate, our hero’s writing becomes more resigned and his behaviour more fanatical as Notes from Underground takes unsuspecting twists as it plots the decay of our anti-hero, made rotten by the world to which he is subjected.
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