Theatre review: Summerfolk

Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk was written in 1904, the year Anton Chekhov died; Nina Raine and Moses Raine's new version for the National moves the action to one year later, possibly so that the characters can make reference to his death, and the obvious comparisons to Gorky's playwrighting contemporary aren't left to be the elephant in the room. Because this all feels very familiar: A large group of well-off Russians (in this case explicitly said to be self-made, nouveau-riche) are on their annual extended summer holiday at a dacha. Some are related: The house belongs to Varvara (Sophie Rundle) and her laywer husband Sergei Bassov (Paul Ready,) while her brother Vlass (Alex Lawther) is nominally Sergei's clerk, but in practice seems to be there mainly to moon over an older woman, the doctor Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell.)

Theatre review: It Walks Around The House At Night

Joe (George Naylor) is an out-of-work actor with a thing for posh boys, who's working in a bar when one of the regulars offers him a well-paid acting job - of sorts. David's nieces will be visiting the family's country pile for a week, and he's promised them an appearance from a resident ghost with a regular routine: It Walks Around The House At Night. One of the things about Tim Foley's ghost story that lets you know you're in (un)safe hands is the way he immediately wrong-foots the audience's mental image of what that title means - never setting foot inside the building, the ghost literally walks around the house, circling it in the surrounding dark woods. Joe is put up at a nearby lodge, asked to leave it only when dark falls and it's time to follow his assigned route through the trees.

Theatre review: Broken Glass

After a wobbly start to the Young Vic's new regime - a Mr Sloane that bafflingly ironed the gay out of Joe Orton, and a Bengal Tiger that was just baffling in general - it settles into a stronger groove with Jordan Fein's take on Arthur Miller. The Broken Glass in his 1994 play is Kristallnacht, the 1938 attacks on Jewish businesses that became the first major sign of the extent to which Nazi Germany was willing to turn its antisemitic rhetoric into action. As stories and photos appear in the newspapers worldwide, New Yorker Sylvia Gellburg (Pearl Chanda) suddenly loses the ability to walk. Referred to Dr Hyman (Alex Waldmann,) he and the experts he consults with are unable to find a physical cause for her disability, and he starts to lean towards theories of something psychosomatic: Confronted with both these brutal images and everyone around her's seemingly blasé responses to them, part of Sylvia has shut down.

Theatre review: Bird Grove

Alexi Kaye Campbell throws a little dig at himself in Bird Grove, as a male writer telling the story of how women's voices needed to be heard, and how one woman made sure hers was one of them. She did do it under the male pseudonym of George Elliot, but in 1841 she's still Mary Ann Evans (Elizabeth Dulau,) a woman whose family is starting to worry might be getting too old to attract a husband. Her father Robert (Owen Teale) has recently retired after a lifetime of hard work which has, however, left him financially very comfortable: He's bought Bird Grove House in Coventry for him and his daughter to live in; the idea is that they'll settle into a new area as a respectable family who'll attract eligible young men to propose to Mary Ann. This isn't getting off to the best start though, as her brother Isaac (Jolyon Coy) has brought along a very bad match in Horace (Jonnie Broadbent.)

Theatre review: The Tempest(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Shakespeare's Globe's winter season is one they can't really make a profit out of due to the Swanamaker's size, so traditionally it's been the one where less obviously commercial choices are made. In the past this has tended to mean expanding the repertoire to less famous Jacobean playwrights and beyond, but for the 2025/26 season it involves two of the more popular Shakespeare plays getting eccentric reinventions. And unlike Holly Race Roughan's Midsummer Night's Dream, which simply took the common trope of finding the play's dark side to its natural extreme, Tim Crouch's look at The Tempest is grounded in ideas I've seen applied to the play a lot less frequently. It is very recognisably Crouch's work, even without the fact that he also appears in it, because in a theme that runs through a number of his plays it takes place in a theatre - specifically this one.