Although strictly speaking the So & So Arts Club in London is out of our jurisdiction we are including their Ever Hopeful Rep Season because, firstly, we like rep and secondly, because the club is open to all artists and actors and makes a great base/focal point for actors visiting London from the provinces. Last night Graham Wyles saw Mercy by Clare Whitehead. This short, delicate and sensitively acted, interior play is perfectly suited to the congenial atmosphere of the So and So’s premises in Fredericks Place and is a welcome piece of new writing for an often neglected part of society.

The director, Nikolai Foster, has give us a spirited little girl, winsome in all the right places, yet streetwise enough to make her way on the mean streets amongst the other industrial waste from a heartless economic system, yet with enough innocent brass to give ‘Mr President’ a pointer or two on how to solve the world’s economic problems. Last night’s Annie, Sophia Pettit, was everything the director could have wanted: with a bright, attractive singing voice and a confidence that belied her years she radiated the optimism that forms the cornerstone of this show’s message and is summed up in the anthemic “Tomorrow”.

L’HOMME CONTENT DE RIEN at the Tobacco Factory on 4th September by La Compagnie des Chemins de Terre. A jovial undertaker, Rene, struggles, partly perhaps through nerves, to contain his ebullient nature whilst addressing the audience who stand in as the relatives of a deceased man killed in some kind of accident. Before him, a banquet set out for the wake is covered by a cloth which, when drawn over the feast, becomes a shroud covering the body. It is the first of the transformations that structure this cunning piece of object theatre.