Sunday in the Park with George (Wyndham’s Theatre, London)

It might not be the most sought after ticket on London’s West End, but James Lapine's (book) and Stephen Sondheim’s (music and lyrics) Sunday in the Park with George is far away the most interesting production currently running in London.

Based on biographical details of the French pointillist George Seurat (1859 – 1891) it explores the classic ménage a trios: the artist, his work and his lover / model. It is refreshing to have a musical that has as it primary concern art and the nature of creation.

Centred on the Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, it is only in the current age of high tech that the Sondheim / Lapine vision can at last be fully and brilliantly realised on stage. The painting is recreated live; the actors appear to step in and out of the frame; drawings become animated on canvasses. One character, a solider, exists entirely as a projection. This production is worth flying to London to see.

The cast are unanimously strong both as actors and singers - an accomplishment in itself, for Sunday in the Park is a notoriously difficult work.

Well done to Cameron Mackintosh for bringing the production from the Menier Chocolate Factory to the West End.

Market Boy (The Olivier, National Theatre, London)

Market Boy is a coming of age story set on the Romford Market during the years 1985 to 1991. This is one play to be missed while in London. If one was looking for evidence that workshopped productions have had their day, Market Boy serves as a good example. It’s as if each participant came up with a banal, stereotyped character and then contributed some clichéd idea towards the plot. The cast list will give you an idea – Boy, Mum, Mouse, Girl, New Boy, and so forth. The story line is as predictable as it is boring. The subject matter has been done to death and this is no reincarnation. The characters are pale shadows of familiar types that appear in far better works, like Shopping and Fucking, the mother and her boyfriend in Jonathan Harvey’s A Beautiful Thing, the yobs and observations on clubbers in John Godber’s Bouncers. The political commentary is feebe in comparison to (and feels borrowed from) Billy Elliot. Thatcher makes cameo appearances, in one instance with giant lobster claws during a recreation of Boy’s first acid trip, which has all the corniness of a sixth form school play. The politics are superficial and confused. It fails to make any kind of statement. It’s for and against Thatcherism, for and against Labour, for and against the market economy, but offers no worthwhile ideas. It’s protest for the sake of sounding off.

It also tries to keep everything light, trivialising the issues it contains. Boy gets sodomised as part of his initiation into Romford Market life, but this is breezed over in seconds and far less traumatic for him than when he discovers his mother (who is single after all) bonking his boss in the back of the shoe van. Boy goes all prudish. Then he spurns his girlfriend for being a 'slag' and 'a slut'. Yet the play merely observes, never comments. It has no moral compass.

The actors are agile and highly competent; this play is a waste of great acting talent. It would be survivable in another space, perhaps a school hall. But what this adolescent romp is doing in the National Theatre and the capital of English language theatre in the world is a mystery to this visitor from Africa.