At the centre of Sentenced is a crime – the hideous crime of rape. Yet Matt Hartley’s short play is not about the crime itself, but about the reactions of four people – the wife of the criminal Janet (An Marie Cavanagh); his brother Andrew (Felix Scott) his PA Amanda (Sarah Jane Wolverson), and finally and most awfully, his victim, Ben (Matthew Pearson).

It is a powerful, sometimes gut-wrenching, play that fills the second half of “programme c”, one of three playing in rotation in the Union Theatre’s Shortcuts 2006 festival. The acting is strong, the presentation strong, if sometimes director Cressida Brown’s use of the contrast between shouting and long pauses is a little overdone.

Yet so often as after viewing a play built around such themes, I am left wondering why? What did this play actually have to say, as it was putting the audience through the wringer? Rape is a terrible thing that has destructive effects far beyond the victim… well yes – I suspect most of us know that already. There’s dramatic tension in Janet’s quest, but does it justify the horror?
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On being told that White Open Spaces was inspired by a provocative press release from Trevor Phillips, chair of England’s Commission for Racial Equality – claiming that there was a “passive apartheid” in the English countryside – you might suspect you are in for an evening of polemic, of heavy-hand rhetoric and the message overwhelming the dramatic moment.

But you’d be wrong. The results demonstrate that when Pentabus Theatre gathered together seven writers in the hills of Ludlow to develop seven monologues, someone was keeping a very strong focus on telling of stories, on presenting drama. And the fact that the political point only peeks in around the edges of these character’s lives makes its presence far more powerful than a direct rant would be.

So in “Joy’s Prayer”, by Ian Marchant, we meet the said Joy (Janice Connolly) – the down-trodden, used-to-be-“in service” cleaner in a country church. (It says a lot for the class of this production — Theresa Heskins’ direction and the acting — that when the lights came up in this scene I thought of the church cleaners I met in Muncaster church before even a word was spoken.)

Joy — addressing the kindly God that is her sole consolation for a hard life — reveals her family circumstances slowly, indirectly. They’ve meant she’s been mistreated, looked down upon all her life in the village where she was born, and where she will die. Yet when the issue of race finally enters her tale, how will she react? It is far from clear, and a beautiful little piece of dramatic tension.
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By Jonathan Grant

Pumpgirl has the hots for Hammy. God knows why. Hammy (James Doran) is a decrepit motorcross star. Pumpgirl (Orla Fitzgerald) is a tomboy, the one who “walks like John Wayne and looks like his horse”. She works in the same decrepit garage that petrol-head “No Helmet” Hammy frequents. Hammy has kids, and a wife with the “stomach of an onion bag” to prove it. But Hammy doesn’t think about his family when planning his affairs. Nor does his wife.

These small Armagh lives, presented in three intercut monologues from a petrol station just north of the Irish border in Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl at the Bush Theatre, are as drab as the environment they inhabit, made decrepit by time, indifference, and the fluctuating exchange rate of its Celtic Tiger cousin. The character’s minds are filled only with thoughts of themselves, as is evident, and indeed emphasised, by the “me, me, me” monologues. Even Sinead, played by Maggie Hayes, the matriarch of this love triangle, prefers not to dwell on any thoughts for her family and children when she too pursues a little extra-marital activity.  

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Were a 12th-century magister at the then centre of learning in the Western world — the university of Paris — to apply the exciting, frightening “New Learning” of Aristotle to Howard Brenton’s In Extremis, a retelling of the much-explored story of the lovers Abelard and Heloise that had its world premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe tonight, he might give it two marks out of three.

There’s a brilliant “antithesis” in the philosophical and political conflict between the adventurous rationalism of the young Peter Abelard and the traditional mysticist of the would-be saint Bernard of Clairvaux. And the synthesis of the whole play – its masterly interweaving of comedy and drama – deserves full marks. Brenton draws unashamedly on the traditions of the Elizabethans, who learnt to “work” a socially mixed crowd in the intimate, fast-moving space of coaching inn, and the brilliance of Shakespeare, who brought the new learning of his own time into the mix.

Who’d have thought that a 21st-century crowd could be listening so intently to philosophical debate from the 12th-century about the nature of the ideal that a solitary ringtone would sound like a thunderclap? When Colin Hurley, who’s spot-on as the knowing, cynical, clever Louis VI, says: “Theology in Paris these days is more interesting than wrestling” there’s no hint of irony, only a laugh of acknowledgement.
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Back in those long-ago days of the Cold War, there was great excitement in the West about the samizdat literature from behind the Iron Curtain. It contained exotic, seductive hints of a forbidden, rebellious sub-culture sneaking behind those stone-faced lines of Red Army soldiers stamping across Red Square.

That looks like ancient history now, but there is still one state in Europe in which much the same conditions prevail – Belarus, with its madly moustached and oddly autocratic president Alexander Lukashenko. Struggling to survive in this suffocating environment is an independent-minded theatre group, aptly named Free Theatre.

To put on its performances in Belarus it has to adopt the kinds of dodges that were all too familiar to dissidents of the post-Stalinist age: banned from a theatre, it moved to a bar. Banned from there, it moved to a private flat. Banned from that, it moved into a forest, pretending that the event was a wedding, until the secret service men left.

Now it has escaped from that suffocating pressure, emerging into the free, if grubby, air of Islington with its first English-language production, aptly titled Techniques of Breathing in an Airlocked Space. Written by the Russian Natalia Moshina, this is not an obviously political play – indeed it is a strong character-centred piece, surprisingly living up to its billing of containing plenty of laughs.
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Paradise means – to the imagination of cold, grey, pinched Western Europe – sun, sand, palm trees, clear blue skies. And that’s what floats ethereally around the heads of the Englishwomen on the Jamaican beach on which Sugar Mummies is set. Floating through their minds is the idea of the perfect man – loving, caring, young, fit. Floating before their eyes are the men who meet that fantasy.

All that’s needed to turn fantasy to clenching reality is a little cash. It is these transactions, the female sex tourism now understood as standard in certain small parts of the world, that are the subject of Tanika Gupta’s new play at the Royal Court in West London. It seems it is a subject whose time has come – recently covered in the RSC’s excellent Trade, and Charlotte Rampling’s movie Heading South, about 1970s Haiti.

And Gupta could hardly have picked a better topic to produce a flood of free publicity from male-edited newspaper editors wondering what it is their wives get up to “girls’ weeks away”. The Daily Mail was particularly exercised by the fact that the actress playing Maggie (Linda Bellingham), the oldest and most cynical of the women, had been the face of wholesome British motherhood in Oxo adverts.

But beyond the news value, what is the value of the play, and the production?
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