Theatre review: Dr. Strangelove

Welp, October's been a busy theatrical month for me and certainly one with a certain prevailing tone - the odd dud among a very high rate of great shows, but good or bad there's definitely been a pretty dark side to everything I've seen. Even the funnier shows have had a touch of bleakness to them, so it's fitting that I end on the play with easily the biggest hit rate of laughs this month; but it gets them from the total annihilation of all life on earth. A long-awaited West End event - tickets went on sale over a year in advance - Armando Iannuci and Sean Foley adapt Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan one-upping Peter Sellers in the film by playing all four roles Sellers had originally been slated to play: Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, Major Kong and the titular character, a German scientist who's definitely glad to have changed sides after the War - the fact that his bionic right arm keeps trying to do a Nazi salute is neither here nor there.

Theatre review: A Raisin in the Sun

As the first play by a black female writer ever to be staged on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun gets an automatic entry into the history books, and has inspired at least two response plays that I've seen, the farcical Clybourne Park and darker Beneatha's Place. So it feels well overdue to get the chance to see the original, and in Tinuke Craig's production the 65-year-old play proves itself worth the attention for more than just getting there first. In an overcrowded Chicago apartment that shares its bathroom with several other families, the Youngers are led by matriarch Lena (Doreene Blackstock,) although her son Walter Lee (Solomon Israel) would dispute who gets to be head of the family. Their lifestyle is about to change, although they don't know quite how: A $10,000 cheque from her husband's life insurance is due in the post any day now, but Lena has so far been tight-lipped about what she plans to do with it.

Theatre review: Othello (RSC / RST)

After a soft-launch of comparatively rare plays in generally fun productions, the Evans/Harvey era of the RSC gets its first big-ticket Shakespeare revival, and all I can say is I hope the opening six months are a more accurate sign of what's to come than Tim Carroll's interminable, dusty go at Othello. Judith Bowden's costumes put us squarely in the original setting of Renaissance Venice, enjoying a period of sustained military success in large part thanks to the black general Othello (John Douglas Thompson.) As such, when Turkey invades the Venetian colonies in Cyprus, he has to interrupt his honeymoon to lead the counter-attack, but he takes his new wife Desdemona (Juliet Rylance) with him, and they remain there for the handover of power. But unbeknownst to him Othello has an enemy in his most trusted lieutenant, Iago (Will Keen.)

Theatre review: Oedipus (Wyndham's)

The same plays or themes do sometimes crop up several times in quick succession - particular stories will strike multiple people as topical after all, and theatres can be too far into their own production by the time they find out someone else has had the same idea - but earlier this year two competing productions of Sophocles' Oedipus were announced within minutes of each other, which has to be some kind of record. At least they're not quite overlapping, and first motherfucker out of the gates is Mark Strong, who plays the tragic king for adaptor-director Robert Icke. It's a return to Greek Tragedy after Icke's epic Oresteia, but while there's a lot that's powerful about the performances, the overall show didn't live up to its predecessor for me. We're in a modern political story, in a state that isn't named, but the Greek writing on the screens suggests it's a version of the original's Thebes.

Theatre review: Reykjavik

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I caught Reykjavik's final preview performance before they invite the press in.

Add Richard Bean to the ever-growing list of playwrights who really just want to write a ghost story: It's fair to say I've had mixed reactions to his plays, but while the writer's biggest hits have been with comedy, the mournful, haunted Reykjavik is probably the best of his plays that I've seen. Set in 1976, with the Cod Wars (Iceland demanding, and invariably getting, an increasingly large area of exclusivity for fishing its waters) nearing their end, the fishing industry that makes up a huge proportion of Hull's economy looks under serious threat. But for Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth,) whose company owns several boats, there's a more immediate problem: One of his trawlers has sunk in the freezing waters off Iceland, and all but four of the crew are dead. It's something all the trawlermen know is a possibility, and the city has traditions for dealing with it.

Theatre review: Eurydice

How to tell an unconventional Eurydice story all the way to the end without Netflix cancelling it? Stella Powell-Jones' answer is of course to stick to the stage, and revive Sarah Ruhl's 2003 version of the Greek myth that sees it through the eyes of its doomed heroine. Eurydice (Eve Ponsonby) is in love with Orpheus (Keaton Guimarães-Tolley,) but their happy wedding party is overshadowed by the fact that her late father can't be there. But since he died her Father (Dickon Tyrrell) has been writing her letters from the Underworld, and on the wedding night a Nasty Interesting Man (Joe Wiltshire Smith) arrives promising to let her read one. It's of course a trap, and Eurydice is reunited with her father in the land of the dead much sooner than expected. And while the dead are meant to forget their lives, father and daughter together manage to remember, and rebuild their relationship.

Theatre review: Statues

Azan Ahmed's Statues, which he also performs in, starts with his character Yusuf entering the flat he grew up in, that he hasn't spent much time in as an adult: His mother moved to Pakistan after his parents divorced, and his father Mustafa, who lived there alone, was an emotionally distant man whom his son remembers as barely even speaking. But as he clears out the flat after his father's death, Yusuf discovers some tapes left behind. After the necessary comedy sequence about anyone younger than Gen X not being able to operate a cassette player, he discovers that when he was younger Mustafa had been a rapper, with witty lyrics covering both his love life and experiences as a British Muslim, and some very catchy tunes (composed by Holly Khan.)

Theatre review: Land of the Free

simple8's return to the stage in 2024 saw them revive an old hit, and now premiere a completely new play - although I'm not sure Land of the Free will have quite as much call for revival as Moby Dick. Sebastian Armesto (also directing) and Dudley Hinton's play looks at a classic American villain, John Wilkes Booth, the first successful presidential assassin. Wilkes (Brandon Bassir) was an actor who we first meet as a teenager with his siblings, rehearsing the assassination scene from Julius Caesar behind their father's back. Junius Booth (Owen Oakeshott) was a successful Shakespearean actor who forbade his children from following him into the profession, but he was also an alcoholic and bigamist whose career, and family reputation were ruined when these secrets were exposed, somewhat undermining his authority.

Theatre review: The Other Place

The National's currently got a full programme of shows that are as critically acclaimed as they are, frankly, bleak, and after the Dorfman's A Tupperware of Ashes and the Olivier's Coriolanus I'm completing the hat trick at the Lyttelton with Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place. Loosely (very loosely, which is why it's got a different title, Simon,) inspired by Antigone, the story's look at burial rites as a way of showing respect or contempt becomes one of how they're about saying goodbye, and how grief can turn into something toxic and twisted. Adam killed himself at his rural family home a few years ago; his brother Chris (Tobias Menzies) now owns it, and has kept the ashes there where he now lives with his new wife Erica (Nina Sosanya) and her teenager Leni (Lee Braithwaite,) as well as Adam's youngest daughter Issy (Alison Oliver) who moved back in when she couldn't pay her rent.

Theatre review: BRACE BRACE

My last trip to David Byrne's (not that one) first season at the Royal Court is for Oli Forsyth's BRACE BRACE, the story of a young couple surviving a hijacking only to face unexpected consequences in the rest of their lives, and Daniel Raggett's production which ramps up the tension and twists - but can't disguise the gaping plot holes. Sylvia (Anjana Vasan) and Ray (Phil Dunster*) are flying to their honeymoon when a lone, mentally ill man manages to take over the plane, briefly looking like he'll bring it down. Ray gets knocked out when trying to stop the hijacker but Sylvia manages to defeat him, becoming a popular have-a-go hero in the press. Inevitably it puts a strain on their relationship, and at first it looks like this will take the form of Ray's wounded pride at being written out of the story in favour of his wife as sole heroine, while she takes it in her stride.

Theatre review: The New Real

My relationship with David Edgar's plays has been mixed: I think my still-strong memories of enjoying Pentecost in the '90s make me always want to give his new work a try, but the RSC's most-commissioned modern writer was also responsible for the notoriously dreary Written on the Heart, and after last week's meh Here In America I felt a bit of trepidation towards the second of his premieres this autumn. The New Real is also described by the blurb as both "epic" and "panoramic," so they're really making sure you know it's going to be long. Still, my first show at Stratford's The Other Place since it was serving as The Courtyard twelve years ago turns out to be flawed, but worth checking out. Edgar returns to Eastern Europe and an unnamed former Soviet state, in a story spanning the last 22 years and looking at the question that has been worrying many political playwrights: How did politics move so far to the Right and so far from reality in that time?

Theatre review: Coriolanus (National Theatre)

This year's National Theatre Shakespeare is a fairly rarely-performed one, and one that I'm generally pretty happy to have stay that way; it does though get a big selling point in David Oyelowo making a long-awaited return to the stage to play Coriolanus. Set in the days of the Roman Republic, Oyelowo's Caius Martius is a nobleman and general who earned his titular surname by almost single-handedly sacking the city of Coriolis, stronghold of the enemy Volscians. On his return to Rome, among the honours heaped on him is the expectation that the next stage in his career will be election as Consul, a position of considerable political power. But first he has to gain the support of the public, whose Tribunes Sicinius and Brutus (Stephanie Street and Jordan Metcalfe) are determined to show him up as unsuitable for power.

Theatre review: A Tupperware of Ashes

The Dorfman's about to go dark for a while for another refurb, but it bows out for now in style with a show reminiscent of The Father, both in subject matter and in being something I was very glad to catch, but wouldn't want to put myself through again in a hurry. In Tanika Gupta's A Tupperware of Ashes Meera Syal plays Queenie, a name whose significance is obscure to start with, but which becomes clearer as Gupta gives us a loose reimagining of King Lear, charting the tragic mental breakdown of an independent, successful British-Bengali woman. Queenie is a chef with her own, recently Michelin-starred restaurant, although some of the things we learn about her success early on in the play come into question soon after: Her behaviour has started to change quite a lot, and her doctor daughter Kamala's (Natalie Dew) worst suspicions are confirmed when she sends her off for tests.

Theatre review: White Rabbit Red Rabbit

I've seen Nassim Soleimanpour's second and third plays structured as cold reads for a different performer every night, but had missed his original hit which, out of necessity, created his signature format in the first place. But following the run of ECHO at the Royal Court a couple of months ago, White Rabbit Red Rabbit now returns for an equally starry West End run at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's recently invested heavily in Global Hypercolor shares. This afternoon the comedian, actor and rapper Ben Bailey-Smith was the guest reader of Soleimanpour's script, something which threatened to derail what turns out to be a pretty dark tale, as a couple of audience members seemed to think they were at a gig and proceeded to heckle him. Fortunately they soon got the message that Bailey-Smith had a script to stick to. In subsequent shows Soleimanpour has expanded on the concept to add himself to the action remotely, but here we get the format in its purest form.

Theatre review: Here in America

It seems a long time since I saw a David Edgar play and all of a sudden he's got two new ones out; first up at the Orange Tree is Here In America, a look at the friendship and professional relationship between playwright Arthur Miller and his regular director Elia Kazan, and how it was strained by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which called them both to testify with very different outcomes. Although the play makes no disguise of who the characters are, they all go by nicknames: Kazan goes by Gadg, short for Gadget (Shaun Evans,) who's invited Art (Michael Aloni) to his house to look at cheese, and to confess to him that he's about to go in front of HUAC to name members of their theatre company who were communists alongside him. Of the two, Art was never actually a card-carrying party member, but he's the one who's still held onto the strongest anti-capitalist beliefs, as well as the sense of honour in not betraying his friends.

Theatre review: The Real Ones

The creative team behind The P Word return to the Bush for what feels like another autobiographical story from Waleed Akhtar - especially given that both leads are aspiring playwrights - about life as a gay British-Pakistani man. This time the scope feels wider though, as it takes us through the sometimes melancholy story of a close friendship over almost twenty years. Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) were friends at school, but only become especially close at the age of 19, when we first meet them: Zaid has moved away to study, and as her parents have only allowed her to go to a local university so she can stay at home, visiting him (while pretending to be on a getaway for young Muslim girls) is one of the only ways Neelam can expand her horizons. Their parents' expectations are something that follow them for much of the story - Akhtar's play is called The Real Ones, and at times it feels as if it's only with each other that they show their real selves.

Theatre review: Bellringers

Bellringers may answer an eternal theatrical question: What if Beckett, but bearable? I have to say my heart sank early on in Daisy Hall's play, as its two male characters, lifelong, loving friends, ponder the big questions of life, death and the universe in a roundabout, chatty manner - the debt to Waiting for Godot is hard to miss. So it was especially heartening to go on to see Hall hold the attention in a way Beckett's never managed for me. Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) are in the belltower of their village's church during a violent thunderstorm, the kind that's been laying waste to all the towns in the area for some time now. Someone has to be up there to ring the bells when the storm comes directly overhead, to scare away the thunder and lightning, but it's the most dangerous job as it's the place most likely to be struck, so the villagers do it on a rota system.