Evie Glen

The BBC’s First Homosexual dramatises archival material surrounding the BBC’s 1957 documentary Homosexuality: The Condition, the Cult and the Crime, the broadcaster’s first documentary about gay men. The review praises the play’s humour, performances and relevance to contemporary LGBTQ+ rights, while noting that its one-hour runtime, small cast and shipping-container venue leave the production feeling cramped and its ending abrupt. Despite these limitations, the reviewer sees it as a compelling preview with the potential to make a stronger impact on a larger stage.

Lomond Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, staged at the Pleasance at EICC, makes the playwright’s bleak and existential drama more accessible by emphasising physical comedy and clownish characterisation. Simon Gleave is singled out for his standout performance as Clov, while Henry Maynard gives a strong performance as Hamm. The production explores the characters’ co-dependent bond and the play’s themes of meaninglessness, endurance and impending catastrophe, ultimately finding unexpected lightness without straying far from Beckett’s original work.

Bob Kingdom’s long-running portrayal of Dylan Thomas in Dylan Thomas: Return Journey offers an elegiac, relatively sober account of the Welsh poet’s childhood and career, largely avoiding the mythology surrounding his American tours, alcoholism and early death. The production is strongest when Kingdom impersonates colorful Welsh villagers and recounts a comic charabanc pub crawl, while his recitations of poems such as “Death Has No Dominion” and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” convey their musicality. However, the poetry is delivered too quickly, sometimes reducing Thomas’s complex modernism to a pastoral image. The production provides veteran Thomas admirers with a more rounded portrait but may feel too dated and restrained to attract younger audiences.