Leopards (Rose Theatre, Kingston, London)
Verdict: cat and mouse morality tale
Rating: 
Rockets and Blue Lights (Dorfman, National Theatre, London)
Verdict: tangled in historical drama
Rating:
Without wishing to give too much away… be careful who you take to Leopards at Kingston's Rose Theatre.
Alys Metcalf's tale of a young woman who entraps an older man in a compromising situation in a hotel bedroom could feel a little bit awkward in the wrong company.
Friends and spouses, OK. Colleagues and family… not so much.
Having said that, Leopards is a relatively conventional drama, in which Saffron Coomber plays 28-year-old Niala, a tourism PR who arranges a business meeting with 50-something Ben, the CEO of an environmental charity, played by Martin Marquez (best known from TV's Hotel Babylon).
Sexual tension: Saffron Coomber plays 28-year-old Niala, a tourism PR who arranges a business meeting in Leopards
The pair spend a little too long circling each other in the lobby during the opening half hour, but the story does finally crackle with sexual tension when she candidly puts him on the spot: does he want to take this upstairs?
Much is owed to David Mamet here; in particular his play Oleanna, about a college professor and his aggrieved student.
As expected, Niala has an agenda: she is seeking revenge. But Metcalf's play has an agenda, too; which is to ask if there can be 'carbon offsetting for morals'. This opaque and clumsy formulation is better known as 'atonement'.
Unlike Mamet, who prefers to have his characters destroy each other, as they do in Greek tragedy, Metcalf's drama is too one-sided. Instead of allowing Ben to defend himself with solid arguments, Metcalf makes him merely well-meaning and conciliatory.
And as well as being righteous, Niala needs to be more challenged.
Alys Metcalf's tale of a young woman who entraps an older man in a compromising situation in a hotel bedroom could feel a little bit awkward in the wrong company
Even so, there are sufficient twists to keep us moderately uncomfortable — and Coomber and Marquez give absorbing performances.
She negotiates her vengefulness with care; and he picks his way through his past with contrition.
Thunder, and a piano bar heard off, add portent (and kitsch) to Christopher Haydon's neat production. And the sterility of corporate culture is distilled in a brown hotel room where a giant bed serves as both High Court bench and sacrificial altar.
What it really needs, though, is a properly bloody ending.
Rockets and Blue Lights is an ambitious, sprawling history play inspired by two pictures of slave ships painted by the Victorian landscape artist JMW Turner.
Overloading her palette, writer Winsome Pinnock meditates on Turner's painting, tells the tragic story of one of his free black contemporaries, includes a teacher introducing pupils to Turner's art, and frames it from the perspective of a black actress making a film about atrocities on slave ships — specifically the notorious massacre on the Zong in 1781.
