Whereas good plays make for better films, novels rarely make good plays. Adaptations are hard enough in the cinema, in the theatre the record is even grimmer. Unfortunately, director Russell Labey’s New Boy based on William Sutcliffe’s debut novel is no exception.

Set in the 1980s at a boys school in suburban north London, this is a coming-of age story told by Mark (Clive Gilson), 17 years old and infatuated with the gorgeous ‘new boy’ Barry. They become best friends, so we are told, yet never shown. It is more dramatic précis than play. The script often lapses in to what might make good stand-up comic routine, were it delivered by comedians – though Nicole Franco as the French teacher Mrs Mumford almost steals the show with her classroom outburst.

Mark, sexually confused and incompetent (at one point he punches a girl in the vagina and appallingly this is presented as an hilarious incident), gets his twisted vicarious thrills by setting his new best friend up with girls. But when Barry falls for Mrs Mumford’s mid-life crisis, the friendship turns toxic with Mark’s sexual jealousy and scheming.

Gilson comes across as far too knowing, too introspective, even unambiguous in his sexuality. The result is an unloveable, rather poisonous, Iago-like character, but with machinations too puerile to admire. There is little cherisable feeling worth savouring here, compared to such sensitive works as A Beautiful Thing or The History Boys.

After Mrs Mumford comes to her senses and breaks off the liaison, to keep close, Mark pursues Barry’s sister, only to find (in what is a joke more symmetrical than is plausible) that Barry was (hey presto!) gay all along and (without his best friend catching on) is in a physical and loving relationship with his brother Dan. They’re a palatable version of a Jerry Springer Show guest family, at least until they start bickering on stage, Mark seething with self-loathing homophobia.

Compared to the last couple of years, there wasn’t as much on in New York to entice me this time around. I’ve seen the musicals worth seeing and there were numerous London transfers I saw in May (Jude Law as Hamlet) or earlier (39 Steps and Billy Elliot is still running, the wonderful Mary Poppins has only now arrived in the US). I’ve heard good things about Next To Normal but I was out of time.

God of Carnage (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)

The production of Christopher Hampton’s translation of French playwright Yasmina Reza’s play cleaned up at the Tony Awards this year: Best Play, Best Actress in a Play (Marcia Gay Harden); Best Direction of a Play (Matthew Warchus), and every other member of the cast was nominated: Hope Davis, Jeff Daniels and James Gandolfini. They are a brilliant ensemble, a real treat to watch; all of them across the board.

With shades of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, two couples meet after the son of one couple (Daniels and Davis) beats up and knocks out the teeth of the other’s (Gandolfini and Harden) son. As upper middle class, educated people they decide to settle the matter in a civilized manner (no law suits), to do the right thing by one another (talk to the children, reconcile them, pay the medical bills). However, in the course of the discussion implications about each other’s parenting, about each other, and their sense of entitlement and fault, quickly strip off any civilizing veneer. The evening soon descends into a Walpurgisnacht chaos.  

It’s a very clever piece of writing. And although the audience collapse with laughter around one, it is also deeply disturbing because underneath it all the satire is devastating.

I’m very pleased to see it is coming to Theatre on the Bay and South African audiences will be exposed to the work, though I admit I’m a little nervous that it will be played too hard for laughs.

West Side Story (Palace Theatre)

This was a little disappointing. Not that on the night I saw it I had a mix of A and B casts, but that the work has dated. One concession was to have the songs that would have naturally been sung in Spanish, sung in Spanish. But this turned out unpopular, so they went back into English, except for Me Siento Hermosa (I Feel Pretty). I noticed not a single Hispanic audience member; the Latin community has not taken ownership of this ‘white’ work, groundbreaking as it was in its day, and this is after all Broadway and tourist mecca.

Arthur Laurents, who is 81 this year, directs. I saw his revival last year of Gypsy with Patti LuPone. He recreated the original production and it was far better from a direction point of view than the Bernadette Peters version I saw a few years ago. So I was looking forward to his West Side, not least as Joey McKneely has recreated the original Jerome Robbins choreography.

Unfortunately, it has become a bit of a boy band version. They’re all in designer jeans and T-shirts. Yet, the Sondheim lyrics stand, and it is after all West Side Story.

Wishful Drinking (at the old Studio 54)

This was indeed a surprise. Carrie Fisher puts her life under a microscope and gives us a blow by blow account her travails as the daughter of entertainment legends and her inescapable iconification as the Star Wars’ princess. Somewhere between Whoopy Goldberg and Elaine Stritch. It is hilarious, and she has the gift of the gab, keeping her star studded audience in stitches for close to two hours.

In the soul of almost every being...raved a seething madness, wild and passionate, with the causes lying deep. No cursory measures can remedy, no superficial explanation can illuminate. These jovial faces that can change into masks of bloodlust and destruction...on smallest provocation,” wrote Can Temba of township violence in Mob Passion (1953).

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted amnesty to the mob that killed, on 25 August 1993 in Gugulethu, Amy Biehl, an American exchange student who was registering voters for South Africa’s first democratic election. When Sindiwe Magona discovered her neighbour’s son was one of the perpetrators, she wrote her novel Mother to Mother, now recounted on the stage as a narrative monologue by director Janice Honeyman and virtuosic actress Thembi Mtshali-Jones.

It is the fictional, heartfelt testimony of the mother of the murderer trying to explain to the mother of the victim, without excusing, how her child, in Themba’s words, was “uncontrollably drawn into hideous orgies” of violence.

Sam Shepard wrote Cowboy Mouth (1971) with Patti Smith while they were having an affair during his prolific and manic early years in the East Village when he was part of the off-off Broadway scene. Shepard has described his one-act plays of this period as “impulsive chronicles”, “slightly embarrassing” with hindsight, but unapologetically churned out while “learning how to write”.

Surprising then that despite it being belaboured with private symbolism for Shepard and Smith, how enduring is its energy, and how easily each subsequent generation identifies with this angst-ridden, graffiti script and its discombobulated protagonists. This time around, it speaks thanks to good performances, but mostly to Christopher Weare’s lucid and coherent design and direction.

In the twilight zone of a detritus ridden room, Slim (Nicholas Pauling at his best), a downtrodden, volatile, would-be rock star, oscillates between worshipping and cursing his mistress and co-habitant Cavale (Tinarie Van Wyk Loots), an ugly duckling outpatient from a mental asylum with a club foot and a crow for a pet. Their frustrated aspiration for fame and fortune and their failure to find messianic redemption through rock ’n roll or some mythic figure such as Jim Morrison’s Lizard King, inevitably prefigures the calamity of their relationship.