Theatre review: Rhinoceros

Omar Elerian continues to be a big advocate of Eugène Ionesco's work, returning to the Almeida after The Chairs to adapt and direct Rhinoceros, a play whose wildness, chaos and horrors mirror the real-life situations it satirises. A quiet Sunday in a small village that may or may not be in France is disrupted when a rhinoceros charges through the square, later followed by a second one (or the same one doing a loop.) Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù plays Berenger, who's already got problems with alcohol before the play starts, and is unlikely to find it easier to cope once the rhinos start arriving - particularly as everyone else in town seems to view them as a minor inconvenience at most. But as the week goes on and everyone tries to get back to work, things are further disrupted as it becomes apparent this isn't an incursion of pachiderms from outside: The human residents are, one by one, turning into rhinos.

Theatre review: The Fair Maid of the West

My first Stratford-upon-Avon trip in six months not to get cancelled due to rail strikes is also my last show of 2023 overall, and what a warm-hearted way to wrap up the year it is. Writer/director Isobel McArthur's The Fair Maid of the West is a (very) loose rewrite of Thomas Heywood's 1631 play, set in the latter days of Elizabeth I's reign when anti-Spanish sentiment was at its peak - you can see what might have attracted McArthur to revisit a time when shifty European types were being blamed for all of England's problems at home. Plymouth barmaid Liz (Amber James) gets framed for murder, and has to accept the help of an over-enthusiastic suitor: The wealthy Spencer's (Philip Labey) family owns a number of taverns, including an abandoned pub in Cornwall she can hide in until he clears her name.

Theatre review: As You Like It (RSC / RST)

For my second As You Like It of the year (second of a planned three, which in most years would make it the most ubiquitous Shakespeare play, but Macbeth has got plans guys,) Omar Elerian's RSC debut has a high-concept cast: Two of them are former presidents of Equity. Oh, and almost all of them are over 70. The conceit (quite simply delivered in a speech to the audience at the start, something any number of elaborate artistic visions might want to consider,) is that this isn't so much a production of As You Like It as a memory of one, an imagined 1975 production from which all the cast members with any significant amount of lines have conveniently survived, and have reconvened in a rehearsal room to try and recreate. A quartet of younger actors join them to read in the roles of absent friends, as well as to help get the leads back on their feet after any scenes that require particular exertion.

Theatre review: Faustus: That Damned Woman

The last time Christopher Marlowe's version of the Doctor Faustus story was seen in London, the Swanamaker cast a female lead to take the journey through knowledge to damnation, but the text remained the same one written by and for a man. For Headlong's production, which opens its tour at the Lyric Hammersmith, a new playwright takes a crack at the old story, retelling it to ask what would make a woman sell her soul in Chris Bush's Faustus: That Damned Woman. Revenge turns out to be the answer, at least as the initial spur, when in 1666 London Johanna Faustus (Jodie McNee) is obsessed with finding out the truth about her mother, who was hanged as a witch. The charge was that she signed her name in Lucifer's book of souls, and Faustus is determined to find out if this was true, even if she has to summon the devil himself to ask him. Lucifer (Barnaby Power) agrees to let her read his book, but only if she signs her own name first and damns herself.

Theatre review: Wish List

For the second year the Royal Court partners with the Royal Exchange in Manchester to stage a Bruntwood Prize winner, and following last year's Yen there's another kitchen sink drama looking at an easily ignored class, whose every last lifeline the current government's all too gleefully eager to cut. Tamsin (Erin Doherty) and her brother Dean (Joseph Quinn) had fairly promising and ordinary lives ahead of them until their mother's death, which led Tamsin to neglect her education and Dean's mild OCD to turn into a completely debilitating condition: He's fixated with all food and drink being scalding hot and has a system of knocking on wood to get him through the day, but his most obsessive ritual is constantly washing and styling his hair. He can barely dress himself let alone work, so it's down to Tamsin to support them both (their father is never mentioned,) but with no qualifications all she can find is a zero-hours contract packing goods for NOT AMAZON DEFINITELY NOT AMAZON.

Theatre review: Lela & co

Real-life atrocities are given an additional level of horror by the smiling face painted on them by Cordelia Lynn's Lela & co. Ana Inés Jabares Pita's black, white and red set feels like something out of a toybox or a circus, a setting for Lela (Katie West) to tell a fairytale-like life story of growing up in the mountains of an unnamed, distant country. There's early signs of an underlying darkness she takes for granted, as she cheerfully recounts how her father would occasionally get violent with his wife and daughters, but the worst is to come once Lela reaches the age of 15. More importantly, this is when her older sister gets married: Her new brother-in-law may or may not have sexually abused Lela; what he definitely does do is arrange a marriage for her, possibly for a fee, with a friend from a different part of the country. In the aftermath of a civil war, the girl finds herself isolated from her family with an abusive husband.

Theatre review: Idomeneus

The mythology of the Trojan War often sees the Greeks' triumph soured, as they return home to face tragedy and betrayal. Cretan king Idomeneus tops off his decade at war with a catastrophic storm on the way home. Of all his ships, only the one carrying Idomeneus himself survives, and only because the king promises the sea god Poseidon a gift: On reaching Crete he'll sacrifice the first living creature he sees. Of course he docks to find his own son Idamantes waiting to greet him. With its themes of human sacrifice, family tragedy and a classic dick move by the gods, it seems like this should be one of the better-known Greek myths, but Idomeneus' post-Troy fate doesn't feature in the Iliad and remains fairly obscure. The sources that do mention it differ on how the story plays out, and that's where Roland Schimmelpfennig's Idomeneus comes in.