Wilton's Music Hall

Richard Cant gives an electric performance in this (largely) one-person play, based on real events, which makes its debut at Wilton’s Music Hall. In 1971, aged 51, Merle Miller – novelist and former editor of Harper’s Magazine – outed himself as gay in a game-changing article in the New York Times. Miller was inspired to write ‘What It Means to be a Homosexual’ in response to a piece by literary critic Joseph Epstein, published the previous year in Harper’s, in which the latter proclaimed: ‘If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the Earth’. This is the starting point for James Corley’s play. ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’ may be a hoary old cliché, but, for Cant’s Miller – drawn, initially unwillingly, out of the seclusion in a quiet New York village to become a leading figure in gay liberation – it’s at the heart of who he is and pivotal in a post-Stonewall Riots landscape. For both good and bad, words are weapons of mass deconstruction in Corley’s script, which draws heavily on Miller’s article – particularly for Cant’s drily delivered refrain that ‘a “fag” is a homosexual that has left the room.’ There are strong parallels drawn between Miller’s frustrated struggles with writing and his ambivalence about entering the battle. Language, personal risk and civil rights intertwine. Director Harry Mackrill keeps Miller’s freewheeling account of his life – mostly addressed to the audience, with constant interruptions by telephone calls from

A passion project for its star Tracy-Ann Oberman, ‘The Merchant of Venice 1936’ relocates Shakespeare’s controversial play to London, 1936 as the Jewish population and its allies confront the British Union of Fascists in the East End of London. Oberman will star as a gender-swapped Shylock at the head of Brigid Lamour’s production, which has toured the country and had a run at the RSC, but seems to only be calling in at London for week – though it is admittedly in the East End of the play’s setting.

They’ve given us ‘Potted Potter’ and ‘Potted Pirates’; now Daniel Clarkson, Jefferson Turner and their director and co-writer Richard Hurst are back, with a madcap dash through all the big panto favourites. Role-swapping, silly costumes and cut-price props underpin their knockabout two-man storytelling, and they have the direct appeal of a couple of overgrown kids engaged in a game whose rules they make up as they go along. Jeff, shorter, more serious, is the theatrical glue; lanky Dan is the prankster, ever ready with a daft quip, a slapstick stunt and occasionally a naughty innuendo. The cleverly judged balance of childish simplicity and adult sauce means the show engages parents as well as their offspring. There’s even a dash of satire: in ‘Dick Whittington’ a Boris Johnson wig turns the hero into a modern-day Lord Mayor of London. Occasionally you suspect that they might be having more fun up on stage than we are watching them. But it’s jovially done; and if it’s a simple offering, there’s a lot to like about a Christmas show that relies on wit rather than glitz.