Beirut, Park Theatre ★★★

Alan Bowne’s 1987 play imagines a future where anti-HIV prejudice has become law

The Crystal Egg, The Vaults, London ★★★

Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: HG Wells’s short story The Crystal Egg, first published in 1897 as his better-known work The War of the Worlds was being serialised, can be thought of as a companion work to the author’s novel of Martian invasion. Its tale of a device which offers visions of life on Mars…

Late Company, Trafalgar Studios, London ★★★★

Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: If you were a couple whose teenage son had died, perhaps the last thing you would do is to invite one of the classmates that had bullied him to suicide and his parents for a conciliatory meal. Perhaps they do restorative justice differently in Canada. Jordan Tannahill’s taut and moving…

Mosquitoes, National Theatre, London ★★★★★

Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN’s Switzerland, two particles flung in opposite directions around the underground toroid structure will reunite and collide. Although the force involved may be little more than that of two mosquitoes flying into each other, muses Lucy Kirkwood’s dazzling new play, the repercussions are huge…

Twilight Song, Park Theatre, London ★★★★

Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: Best known for his play My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot’s writing for the stage was dominated by a sense of yearning, and the deleterious effects of love. Completed before his death in 2014, Twilight Song illustrates, in its premiere production at the Park Theatre, an echoing of the same…

Certain Young Men, National Theatre, London ★★★

Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: Part of the National Theatre’s Queer Theatre season of rehearsed readings, Peter Gill’s Certain Young Men is a collection of scenes, some related but many not, about the lives of four gay male couples. Written at the end of the 1990s, some five years before the Civil Partnerships Act gave the first…