A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky
Lyric, Hammersmith, until 5 June
Counting the Ways
Oval House
The Lyric theatre in Hammersmith has an eccentric approach to the dearth of writing talent. Unable to find a good playwright, it has commissioned three bad ones to showcase their talentlessness in a single work. One assumes that the three men were jesting when they described their collaborative method as ‘writing scenes on rolls of wallpaper and passing one pen between us’. Or maybe they were being candid. The play is flawed at every level. Narratively, the script is so dense that the drama can never achieve lift-off. Four brothers must meet and be reconciled before the fifth brother, suffering from cancer, expires. That’s plenty of material there but the committee has added a cosmic event that will terminate life on planet Earth in two weeks’ time.
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