SHOW OF THE WEEK
Dry Powder Hampstead Theatre, London Until Mar 3, 1hr 45mins
If you don’t already hate super-rich hedge-funders, this play will have you gnashing your teeth – especially at the ruthless woman in a financial firm with a few dozen millions (‘dry powder’) in its slush fund.
Howards End star Hayley Atwell – all tight clothes and tight fists – is superb as Jenny (recently played in New York by Claire Danes), a number-crunching human calculator with blank eyes. She loves money like a shark loves blood.
The setting is a New York private-equity firm that has been lambasted by the press because the boss threw his second wife-to-be an absurdly lavish engagement party – the novelty guest was a real elephant – on the same day he fired all the workers from a firm he acquired.
Tom Riley as Seth and Hayley Atwell as Jenny. Howards End star Atwell – all tight clothes and tight fists – is superb as Jenny (recently played in New York by Claire Danes)
It’s not just the press. The redundant workers are yelling hate at his fund’s investors. ‘Of course they’re protesting. That’s what unemployed people do,’ says Jenny. How predictable the little people are! At the heart of the plot is an emerging deal. Jenny’s kinder colleague, Seth (Tom Riley), has befriended the owner of an American luggage company that’s looking to be acquired, and negotiated a bargain price.
Hayley Atwell with Joseph Balderrama. American writer Sarah Burgess’s play doesn’t dig very deep. Her villains are more panto than real. But it’s a dead slick evening
Seth thinks they should keep the company intact and appease their critics; Jenny sees a chance to export the jobs to Bangladesh and make a shedload. Their restless boss – a wonderfully irascible Aidan McArdle – is dithering. The elephant business has clearly rattled him.
The restless boss – a wonderfully irascible Aidan McArdle. He threw a lavish party on the same day he fired all the workers from a firm he acquired
With its language of ‘zero-based budgeting’ and ‘leveraged buy-outs’, the addictive jargon of high finance is part of the comedy – as is the sense of entitlement of the deal-makers. They work 70 hours a week – haven’t they earned the right to make a few hundred morons redundant?
American writer Sarah Burgess’s play doesn’t dig very deep. Her villains are more panto than real. But it’s a dead slick evening and Atwell shines as the pretty but unacceptable face of capitalism.
Eugenius! The Other Palace, London Until Mar 3, 2hrs 20mins
Rating: 
This new musical is a hymn to Spandex, sci-fi and Eighties nostalgia. Ben Adams and Chris Wilkins’s story is about a bullied school geek, Eugene (Liam Forde), who – encouraged by his adoring college friend (Laura Baldwin) – obsessively draws his Marvel-style comic strip. It features muscly Tough Man, his nemesis Evil Lord Hector and the curvaceous Super Hot Lady.
Dan Buckley as Feris, centre, and Liam Forde as bullied school geek Eugene, far right. Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker of Star Wars fame) does the voiceover for the cardboard robot Kevin
A going concern, the strip is made into a Hollywood movie by a sleazebag director (Cameron Blakely in his element). This over-the-top coming-of-age show is decked out with a flying saucer on a string, beat-box numbers and power ballads. Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker of Star Wars fame) does the voiceover for the cardboard robot Kevin.
Only half the jokes work but the parodic spirit is oddly irresistible. I especially liked the prancing fish-men who chant ‘swim, eat food, forget’ and flap their fins in unison.
Orchestrated by director Ian Talbot, it’s silly enough to lift the spirits, if not to blast you into an orbit of ecstasy.
John Dorfman Stage, National Theatre, London Until Mar 3, 3hrs 20 mins
Rating: 
You can hear the sound of paint drying in this desperately slow American play. For more than three hours nothing keeps happening in a bed-and-breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of the famous Civil War battle.
A bickering young couple arrives to tour the battle sites. He’s aggressive and quick to take offence, she complains of the cold. The slightly spooky house – jam-packed with knick-knacks and dolls – is run by a dotty old duck called Mertis (nicely played by Marylouise Burke). Her blind friend (gravelly June Watson, inset left with Burke), who used to be insane, comes to visit.
The slightly spooky house is run by a dotty old duck called Mertis (Marylouise Burke). Her blind friend (June Watson, with Burke), who used to be insane, comes to visit
Occasionally funny, spookily suggestive, it rambles on for ever. I rather hoped Mertis would reveal herself as a witch. Or that the dolls would climb down off their staircase shelves and stab someone – preferably James Macdonald, the director. I certainly hoped the two intervals would come around faster than they did.
Incidentally, John, the title character, we never meet. Typical.
The author of this completely cuckoo piece of whimsy, the award-winning Annie Baker, has many fans. They are welcome to her.
Murder, Margaret And Me Salisbury Playhouse Until Feb 24, 2hrs 25mins
Rating:
This comedy-mystery-drama starts with Agatha Christie announcing a murder. She wants to bump off Hercule Poirot. What follows, however, is an account of the writer’s frosty relationship with the chin-wobbling actress Margaret Rutherford, who played Miss Marple in a series of Sixties films.
Christie thought she was wrong for the part (she told Joan Hickson, who had a bit-part in one of the Christie films and later became the ultimate TV Marple, that she should play her detective). Rutherford thought Marple was beneath her.
From left: Kate Brown as Christie, Tina Gray, and Sarah Parks. This comedy-mystery-drama starts with Agatha Christie announcing a murder. She wants to bump off Hercule Poirot
In Philip Meeks’s thoughtful, investigative play, Christie sets out to find out about Rutherford’s astonishing childhood. It’s a tale of insanity, murder and deep family tragedy.
What links the two celebrities? The answer is buried secrets.
Anyone expecting a murder mystery will be disappointed by this meandering play. But the revelations are fascinating and the characters brought to full life by Sarah Parks’s jaw-jutting, eccentric Rutherford, and by Kate Brown as the rather forbidding Christie.
This tweedy evening is not as cosy as it first seems, suitably for a story about the Queen of Crime.
The Brothers Size Young Vic, London Until Wed, 1hr 30mins
Rating: 
Tarell Alvin McCraney’s lean and lyrical tale of fraternal bonds made its debut at the Young Vic a decade ago – and since then the writer has won a Best Screenplay Oscar for Moonlight, adapted from his own play.
Meanwhile, director Bijan Sheibani comes fresh from a garlanded stint on the Barber Shop Chronicles at the National Theatre. This electric production leaves us in no doubt of why they’ve become stars.
From left: Sope Dirisu, Jonathan Ajayi and Anthony Welsh. Patrick Burnier’s simple set – a chalk circle filled with red powder – and the richly poetic script hint at a ritualistic earlier age
Free-wheeling Oshoosi Size (a scene-stealing Jonathan Ajayi) is determined to snooze the morning away, despite the protestations of his hard-working older brother, Ogun (a brilliantly controlled Sope Dirisu), with whom he’s living in Louisiana after being released from jail on parole. Ogun’s bid to return him to the straight and narrow is thwarted by Oshoosi’s slippery prison-mate Elegba, played with a discomfiting inscrutability by Anthony Welsh.
Patrick Burnier’s simple set – a chalk circle filled with red powder – and the richly poetic script also hint at a ritualistic earlier age. Yet the obstacles the men face, from police harassment to relationship troubles, are contemporary.
A scene where the characters run in unison around the stage showcases Aline David’s precise choreography. But it’s a loose-limbed dance between Oshoosi and Ogun that sums up the play’s core preoccupation: their half-brawling, half-embracing movements portray the simultaneously infuriating and heart-swelling quality of familial love.
Gwen Smith
Rothschild & Sons Park Theatre, London Until Sat, 1hr 55mins
Rating:
There is a vast chasm between Tevye the simple milkman and the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, both the subject of musicals by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick – Tevye in the 1964 classic Fiddler On The Roof, Mayer Rothschild in this show, first seen in 1970. While Tevye tried to marry off five daughters, Rothschild used five sons to create a financial powerhouse against the odds.
An impoverished coin-seller stuck in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt at the end of the 18th century, Mayer’s wiles and his male progeny enable him to advance to a shop, and eventually conquer Europe financially, to the point where they can loan armies the money required to fight Napoleon’s invasion in exchange for tearing down Jewish ghettos. Despite victory, the deal is reneged on by the borrowers.
Glory Crampton as Gutele Rothschild. This reworked version of the show is well sung and competently directed by Jeffrey B Moss. But it’s all heavy-going
This is not just a tale of hypocrisy, anti-Semitism, money, risk and power, but also family and cross-generational conflict. And the sting is in the hint that although the Rothschilds’ demands are eventually met, Jews will suffer again.
This reworked version of the show is well sung and competently directed by Jeffrey B Moss, and there is a polished performance as Mayer from Broadway star Robert Cuccioli, but it’s all heavy-going. As for the score, only the anthemic Everything – revealing the family ambition – recalls Fiddler’s energy and that show’s Tradition number.
By virtue of its authorship, there’s a curiosity value here, but if you want fun and hummable tunes, bank on the milkman.
Mark Cook