This Is Going To Hurt (Apollo Theatre, London)
Verdict: Queasy rider
The Great Gatsby (Immersive LDN)
Verdict: Fizzy Fitzgerald
Rating: 
Lone Flyer (Watermill, Newbury)
Verdict: Little gem
Rating:
Given the fevered state of the nation, re-opening the West End with a hospital doctor who’s gone rogue was a stroke of mischievous genius.
The doc in question is Adam Kay, and the show is based on his best-selling book, This Is Going To Hurt.
What he’s not offering is a cure for our Covid confusion. Quite the opposite.
Kay gave up working as a gynaecologist ten years ago, after doing a Caesarean section that went horribly wrong.
Since then, he’s been dealing with his demons by turning his medical diary into comedy. But as a form of therapy, this 60-minute show makes The Exorcist look like CBeebies’ In The Night Garden.
Kay speaks of the NHS as if though was a limitless Grand Guignol of horror stories; and he preps us with grisly anecdotes — including one about a student who ‘degloved’ (scraped all the skin off his hands, if you must know) on an ill-advised night out.
Horror stories: Former NHS doctor Adam Kay has turned his medical diary into a dark comedy show
Mercifully, he also has a Tom Lehrer-ish gift for musical spoofs, played on an electronic keyboard.
A GP consultation is set to the tune of The Bangles’ Eternal Flame, and there’s a Lionel Richie smokers’ ballad (‘Wheezy like Sunday morning’).
Performing in scrubs, behind giant bottles of pills, Kay has the shell-shocked look of a man who’s seen too much, too young.
He went down a storm with the NHS staff at my performance; but non-medics may want to approach with caution.
(The show runs at the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue, until November 15 before a residency at the Palace Theatre, Charing Cross Road, from December 21-January 3).
The Great Gatsby was one of the first interactive shows to report problems with audiences getting a bit too frisky when it opened in 2018.
Covid has added an extra layer of taboos (though, thanks to social distancing, groping shouldn’t be a problem).
But the amazing thing about this fresh, fizzy performance, in which we pretend to be guests at a house party hosted by 1920s American millionaire Jay Gatsby, is that it’s happening at all.
The show is managed along strict Covid guidelines, allowing us to be scattered about a huge indoor space, and served drinks at a safe distance.
Only the nattily dressed actors are maskless, welcoming us to the party and ushering us from the auditorium to share gossip in boudoirs.
Fittingly, it’s cast with handsome young people who look as though they’ve been plucked from the pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair.
As Gatsby, Craig Hamilton is an enigma in a pink suit, oozing the savoir faire of a seasoned jet-setter.
There are musical numbers performed on a piano, including some Ed Sheeron-ish crooning from Lucas Jones.
But most impressive is the jitterbug dancing, which sets the night alight.
It’s not as deep and meaningful as Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, but who wants that at a party anyway? I was quite happy to top up on the fizz and enjoy the show.
At the Watermill, they’re reviving Lone Flyer, Ade Morris’s gem of a play about aviator Amy Johnson — the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia in 1930.
Born in Hull in 1903, Johnson set her heart on the Civil Service, but wound up instead in a London solicitor’s office, where she discovered her passion for flying.
The two-person show uses nothing more than a set of antique suitcases, travel trunks and a luggage trolley that doubles as Amy’s cockpit in the Gypsy Moth airplane she flew from Croydon to Oz.
And she’s perfectly cast in Hannah Edwards (pictured below), with her bonny face alternately foggy with self-doubt and luminous with sunshine.
Benedict Salter has a light touch in his multiple roles — as Amy’s affably supportive father, her cold fish Swiss lover and eventually her husband (and fellow pilot) Jim.
Salter also adds atmosphere, striking melancholy chords on a cello.
It can be a bumpy ride, cutting back and forth in time and space, and the end is a little confusing.
But Edwards beautifully bottles Johnson’s intrepid spirit.
A New Dark Age (Royal Opera House)
Verdict: Second part of a double bill is best
Rating:
It is all to the good that this evening has a strong female presence, as women composers have never had a fair chance at Covent Garden.
Hannah Kendall’s The Knife Of Dawn, which has been seen before – at the Roundhouse in 2016 – focuses on the Guyanese poet and activist Martin Wylde Carter (1927-97), imprisoned when Britain overthrew the elected government of British Guiana in 1953.
We see Carter during his month-long hunger strike and Tessa McWatt’s text uses many of his own words, including some of his poems.
The music is not memorable and it is carried by baritone Peter Brathwaite’s magnificent declamation.
Ola Ince’s production, designed by Vicki Mortimer, is virtually black and white, the offstage voices of two sopranos and a mezzo-soprano add to the atmosphere and video is cleverly employed. Jonathon Heyward conducts a small ensemble skilfully.
Much more rewarding aurally is A New Dark Age, in which music by Missy Mazzoli, Anna Meredith and Anna Thorvaldsdottir is strung together – only one piece, by Meredith, is new but the ten sections make a convincing whole and the electronic elements enhance the effects.
The new dark age of the title is obviously the pandemic.
In Katie Mitchell’s production we see sopranos Nadine Benjamin and Anna Dennis and mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley sitting on three chairs or standing by them, masked when not singing.
A film by Grant Gee, beautifully mixed to create imaginative montages, alternates with the stage picture: we see the three singers separately leaving their homes and finding their way through a lockdown London landscape full of Covid-19 warning notices.
If this aspect seems rather too self-referential, it works well in context and the music is all of high quality, as is the singing.
Natalie Murray Beale conducts the 12-strong orchestra and eight-strong choral group. The programme is well worth seeing online, where it is available for three more weeks.
Tully Potter