It is obvious that the inspiration for Bruce Norris's entertaining satire is Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 A Raisin In The Sun, since his first act is essentially a comical look at the offstage action of Hansberry's drama about an African-American family preparing to move into an all-white neighbourhood.
A world premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand it generates a lot of attention – on the other, if the final coat of paint has yet to dry, things can get a bit sticky.
This adventurous Richmond theatre makes something of a specialty of rediscovering hundred-year-old plays, and they've delivered another gem with Arthur Wing Pinero's 1908 melodrama-satire.
According to Jorge, the troubled hero of this brilliant new play by the young Chilean writer-director Guillermo Calderon, his country reminds him of the month of December. Chile, he says, is full of "sad celebrations"; and Calderon's bitter and hilarious 80-minute comedy is set during one of them, a dismal Christmas Eve get-together involving Jorge and his twin sisters, both of whom are pregnant.
The playwright talks to Heather Neill about her latest play, Welcome to Thebes (National), which takes the stories of Antigone, Theseus and Eurydice and sets them in a contemporary war-torn African state.
Harry Joy could almost be Reggie Perrin. But instead of voluntarily faking his death, he awakens from a heart attack and momentary clinical death, to discover that the true nature of his life has been a living hell.
Lorrie Moore's classic 1985 story is less a how-to guide than a description of a typical affair, told in the form of instructions: here's how you'll meet, this is how long you'll wait before going to bed with him, here's how you'll react when he admits he's married, and so on.
Yesterday morning's concert at the Queen's Hall must hold the record for the smallest Festival audience there, certainly this year and perhaps ever. The house was less than half full for choral ensemble Ars Nova, visiting from Copenhagen with director Paul Hillier.
Drunks staggering about the streets, financial disaster, rampant voyeurism: sound familiar? 'Bedlam', Nell Leyshon's blackly comic new play for Shakespeare's Globe is set in the notorious eighteenth-century madhouse, but it's brimful of fierce modern relevance.
So far, the final Festival week is turning out to be a cracker, with a magnificent Mahler Third Symphony on Tuesday night to add to other significant triumphs of the Usher Hall series.
