Theatre review: The Cherry Orchard (RSC/Swan)

Kenneth Branagh has a long history with the RSC: Playing Hamlet there; not getting the Artistic Director job; starting a petition to ban anyone who didn't go to RADA from ever being employed there (probably.) Now he's reunited with something else he left behind decades ago: His Belfast accent, as he plays Chekhov's representative of a rising new monied middle class in The Cherry Orchard. SirKenBran's Lopakhin is a voice of brutal pragmatism in a world of aristocratic old romantics who've not quite got to grips with the new Russia that's been growing up around them ever since the serfs were emancipated. Madame Ranyevskaya (Helen Hunt) has just been on a European tour with her daughter Anya (Chumisa Dornford-May,) where she's been spending cash liberally, cheerfully ignoring the fact that her family's fortune is long gone.

Theatre review: The Constant Wife

Based on a W. Somerset Maugham play that's one year shy of celebrating its centenary, Laura Wade's The Constant Wife gives us a fun but complicated twist on the new, liberated women of the 1920s. Constance (understudy Jess Nesling*) has been married for 15 years, and remains perfectly happy with her husband. But John (Luke Norris) has been having an affair with her best friend Marie-Louise (Emma McDonald) for some time, something everyone but her seems to know about. Her mother Mrs Culver (Kate Burton) and sister Martha (Amy Morgan) disagree over whether to tell her, but things come to a head when Marie-Louise's husband Mortimer (Daniel Millar) finds out about the affair and confronts them. At which point Constance bends over backwards to disprove the truth, not because she doesn't believe it but because she knows all about it and wants to keep the lie going.

Theatre review: Punch

James Graham's widest audience has arguably come from Sherwood, the TV crime drama not only located in the Nottinghamshire area where he grew up, but also with a story built entirely on the very specific historic tensions that have a ripple effect there to this day. He stays in Nottingham for his latest return to the stage with a production that originated there, and a play based on a true story: Jacob Dunne (David Shields) was 19 when he joined some of his friends in a drunken fight, and punched a stranger, James Hodgkinson, who fell to the street and hit his head. Jacob ran away from the scene and more or less forgot about the assault, but nine days later James died of his injuries and Jacob was suddenly facing a murder charge. Punch follows his life leading up to that point, as well as the surprising turns it took after he served a 30-month prison sentence for manslaughter.

Theatre review: A Face in the Crowd

Kwame Kwei-Armah's final directing job at the Young Vic is a new musical by Elvis Costello (music and lyrics) and Sarah Ruhl (book,) that adapts the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd. Judging by the Wikipedia summary of Elia Kazan's film, some liberties have been taken with the plot to make it even more topically relevant, but it certainly seems like this was a story that called out for revisiting in a year full of high-profile elections. Marcia Jeffries (Anoushka Lucas) is a small-town radio host whose show focuses on regular people whose voices don't usually get heard - like the inmates of the county jail, where she finds Lonesome Rhodes (Ramin Karimloo,) being held for drunk and disorderly behaviour. When he sings a song that charms both her and her listeners she invites him to become a regular contributor, and within weeks his hokey folk wisdom has made him the star of the show.

Theatre review: Red Speedo

Well I didn't have weaponising "You Got It" on my Bingo card of what theatres would try this year, but that's what Matthew Dunster's production of Red Speedo does, replaying the song on a constant loop before the show begins, before ramping up the volume to levels even an Orange Tree matinée audience should have been able to hear. At least it's better than those ten-second sound loops I've had at some shows, and it turns out Roy Orbison's song is such a banger I was still tapping my feet to it by the seventh or eighth repetition. On-topic lyrics aside, I was expecting a reference to this being a motivational aid the protagonist listened to before a race, but nothing so specific transpired to explain the choice. Holly Khan's sound design also goes in for a loud klaxon to mark the start and end of every scene, echoing the way Olympic swimming races are started, and giving the audience an occasional jolt.

Theatre review: Nachtland

Despite an incredibly irritating social media publicity campaign (who were those messages raving about the show months before it opened even meant to be from, anyway?) I've been looking forward to the Young Vic's Nachtland: Marius von Mayenburg's dark satire (translated here by Maja Zade) has a viciously clever premise, and Patrick Marber's production has a great cast. The resulting evening is an entertaining one, but a frustrating one as well. The audience enter to Anna Fleischle’s set absolutely covered in dusty old props, which the cast clear away before the action starts: Siblings Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Philipp (John Heffernan) are clearing out the house of their recently-deceased father, bickering about who looked after him when he was alive and whose story it is to tell even as they narrate it to the audience.

Theatre review: The Time Traveller's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 fantasy romance The Time Traveller's Wife has been so popular it's already been given multiple screen adaptations, in an apparent contest to see how many times you can do a story revolving around a lot of male nudity without ever showing cock. Now it's the, somehow simultaneously inevitable and utterly unlikely, musical theatre adaptation: Lauren Gunderson (book,) Joss Stone & Dave Stewart (music & lyrics) and Kait Kerrigan (additional lyrics) take on the story of a naked man who grooms a young girl over a period of several years, and then his feet fall off. Librarian Henry (David Hunter) meets Clare (Joanna Woodward,) who does papier-mâché professionally, in a library when they're in their twenties, but she already seems to know a lot about him, including his supernatural secret.

Theatre review: The Pillowman

Not only do the shows cancelled for the 2020 lockdown keep coming back to life, it does seem like that lost year of theatre had an extraordinary amount of shows I'd been particularly looking forward to: Like The Pillowman, the 2003 play widely regarded as Martin McDonagh's best, but which I hadn't seen yet. Originally slated to star Tom Sturridge, I did wonder if it was a coincidence that the production's rescheduling was announced shortly after The Sandman's renewal, as if they'd been waiting to see if Sturridge could still make it, or if they should go in a different direction. Quite a different direction at it turns out: Lily Allen's casting is apparently the first time the lead character of Katurian has been reimagined as a woman. Katurian and her brother Michal (Matthew Tennyson) led a childhood of cruel and unusual abuse by their parents, whom she eventually murdered.

Theatre review: John Gabriel Borkman

John Gabriel Borkman isn't one of the more frequently-produced Henrik Ibsen plays - I've only ever seen it once before, and then in a short, heavily rewritten, monologue adaptation. It can't be topicality that's the problem - given that the title character is a corrupt, arrogant banker, you could theoretically have a production of it playing somewhere in the world 24/7 and guarantee the famous phrase "timely revival" got chucked at it. It does, however, conform to all the stereotypes about Ibsen's work being dark, moody and bleak. JG Borkman (Simon Russell Beale,) once a financial giant, was convicted of embezzlement. He spent five years in prison and, since his release, a further eight years essentially under self-imposed house arrest. In the first act, all we know of him is the sound of him relentlessly pacing his room.

Theatre review: The House of Shades

Anne-Marie Duff returns to the stage, bringing with her the usual trepidation over what her generally questionable taste in plays will serve up this time. Beth Steel's The House of Shades isn't among the dodgier shows I've seen Duff in (I made it to the end of this one,) but it does suggest that if you asked her if she wanted a side of subtlety with her political commentary, you'd get a firm "no thanks!" Blanche McIntyre directs a family saga of a Nottinghamshire mining town, spanning from 1965 to 2019 - from optimism about what the trade unions and the Labour Party could do to help the country, all the way to the fall of the "red wall." Duff plays Constance, who fled an abusive father in the only way available to a woman in her position: By marrying the first man who came along. But starting her own family with Alistair (Stuart McQuarrie) soon just turned into a different kind of trap.

Theatre review: The Collaboration

Andy Warhol made a couple of cameo appearances in the Young Vic's last production, Best of Enemies; for Anthony McCarten's The Collaboration he takes centre stage. But where the 1960s Warhol we saw last year was at the height of both his creativity and his celebrity, the 1984 Warhol (Paul Bettany) we meet now is all too aware that - while still a big name - his work has become predictable, his prices are falling, and the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeremy Pope) are the names on everyone's lips now: Warhol still hangs out with Yoko Ono, but Basquiat gets photographed with (and may or may not be sleeping with) Madonna. The two wildly different artists do share an agent, Bruno (Alec Newman,) and he sees the idea of an unlikely collaboration between the two as a way both of propelling his up-and-coming client even further, and of revitalising the established one's flagging creativity.

Theatre review: The Forest

Florian Zeller's written his play again, and this time it gets its world premiere not in his native French but in English, and not at the Kiln but a couple of stops down the Jubilee Line at Hampstead Theatre. As usual Christopher Hampton takes on translation duties for The Forest, for most of the characters at least - I got the distinct impression that Laurence had had her dialogue run through Google Translate. This disparity in style presumably has some significance; either that, or Gina Mckee has seriously pissed someone off, and got punished with the role of a rather dim-witted robot. Laurence is married to Pierre, a successful and influential surgeon, played in Jonathan Kent's production by both Toby Stephens and Paul McGann. We first see the Stephens version in his Paris apartment with his wife, preparing to make a speech making major recommendations on French medical policy and its relationship with Big Pharma.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Young Vic)

Returning to the London stage after a few years of fighting The Good Fight and, more dangerously, The Good Wife in America, Cush Jumbo comes to the Young Vic to play Hamlet for Greg Hersov, a director she worked with a lot in the past when he was Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange in Manchester. There's centuries' worth of tradition of women taking on the role, as well as black actors more recently, but I think she might be making history as the first woman of colour to do it in a major London production. There was never much doubt that she was up to the task, and she gives a powerful performance; but while Hamlet remains my favourite Shakespeare play on account of how infinitely flexible it is, it is of course performed very often because it's seen as such a pinnacle of an actor's career. And this was one of those productions that made me wonder - outside of wanting to give an actor their shot at the big role, what was the reason for staging this particular production, at this time?

Theatre review: 2:22 A Ghost Story

SPOILER ALERT: I don't spoil any twists that actually happen in the play in this review; however I do mention a couple of red herrings that don't lead to anything, so you may want to consider that if you're planning on seeing the show and want it to fully misdirect you.

Tuesday's West End trip saw a TV show spin off to the stage; Thursday's doesn't actually do the same with a podcast (although that's bound to be on the cards next,) but it does market itself heavily on the back of one. I did in fact listen to The Battersea Poltergeist, which I found a suitably chilly accompaniment to a winter lunchtime walk around the park, but I hadn't realised quite how many others were doing the same - apparently at one point it was the most listened-to drama podcast worldwide, so it makes sense that playwright Danny Robins' new play would want to capitalise on the notoriety of a show he wrote and hosted. Especially when that play is called 2:22 A Ghost Story. New parents Jenny (Lily Allen) and Sam (Hadley Fraser) are renovating the large East London house they recently bought off an elderly widow. But for the most part Jenny has been there alone with their baby, as astronomer Sam has been working on Sark, an island noted for its clear skies with no light pollution.

Theatre review: A Kind of People

Racism and insidious forms of discrimination seem to have been a major theme in London theatre over the last week, and at the Royal Court Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's A Kind of People aims to cover not just the obvious instances of casual and not-so-casual racism, but also deeply-ingrained prejudices and preconceptions based on class and background. It's an ambition that doesn't quite pay off but builds some strong moments in a story built around a mixed-race couple – Gary (Richie Campbell) is black, his wife Nicky (Claire-Louise Cordwell) is white, and they've been together since they were 16. At the time they faced a lot of obstacles, particularly from her father, but several years and three children later they're settled in a flat on an estate, to all intents and purposes as happy together as they've ever been. Their close circle of friends are people they grew up with, including Mark (Thomas Coombes,) with whom Gary also works as a dishwasher engineer.

Theatre review: Two Ladies

Biddle de-dit de-dee,

Two Ladies sees the Bridge Theatre return - after a glorious summer diversion into Shakespeare - to its official identity as a new writing venue; as well, unfortunately, as to its entirely unofficial one as a rather disappointing new writing venue. Nancy Harris' new play isn't just about two ladies but about two First Ladies, behind the scenes at a crisis summit following multiple terrorist attacks on US soil. The highly conservative American President is expected to respond in the usual way, by declaring war on whichever Middle Eastern country he can blame the attacks on, while his liberal French counterpart, who's hosting the summit, is expected to try to dissuade him. Meanwhile their wives are meant to be making speeches at a women-in-business conference that feels even more like a sideline given the severity of what the politicians are discussing.

Theatre review: Death of a Salesman

Spoiler alert: The salesman still dies.

If London's unofficial Arthur Miller festival has been all about the playwright's unforgiving criticism of capitalism, it's only fitting that its finale is Death of a Salesman, in which an unremarkable man gives his life to the system in hope of its promised rewards, and is instead discarded by it as soon at his usefulness is done. But as is very clear in Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell's production this is actually the tragedy of two men, father and son, each broken by a different aspect of what the American Dream promised them. Willy Loman (Wendell Pierce) is a 63-year-old travelling salesman who's been doing the job since his teens, and returns home early from a trip after a near-miss car accident. It's one of many in recent months and his wife Linda (Sharon D. Clarke) has reason to believe they've not been accidents at all but suicide attempts.

Theatre review: A German Life

Twelve years after unofficially retiring from the stage Maggie Smith* is back and, in typical fashion, not doing things by halves - A German Life is just her on stage for nearly two hours. Christopher Hampton’s monologue about Brunhilde Pomsel is based on the 106-year-old’s testimony, given shortly before her death after a lifetime of refusing to comment, to a documentary crew interested in her unique perspective on World War II. That perspective was as a secretary for the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, never working directly for Joseph Goebbels but for a number of his right-hand men. But her story begins earlier, with her first few jobs which were all for wealthy Jewish businessmen, an avenue of work which soon dried up as the Nazis came to power – and the Nazi party themselves became the best source of work, first at the state broadcaster and then at the Ministry of Propaganda itself.

Theatre review: A Very Very Very Dark Matter

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. Parklife!

Martin McDonagh's Lieutenant of Inishmore was revived this summer, a reminder of his early work's wilfully controversial nature, love of blood and gore, and tendency to go to some pretty surreal places. Seventeen years on from that play's debut and with McDonagh now a big name in film as well as theatre, all of those remain present and correct, except the weirdness has been dialled up to new levels. Kicking off the Bridge Theatre's second year and playing from now until early January, there's a feel of the dark Christmas story to A Very Very Very Dark Matter, especially since it includes an appearance by the man most credited with creating the modern image of Christmas; it should go without saying that it's not one for the kids though, and even if you go in with the playwright's reputation preceding him the places he goes are likely to be very unexpected.

Theatre review: Home, I'm Darling

Laura Wade’s new play opens with a cheesy domestic scene straight out of a 1950s sitcom, as perfectly-coiffed housewife Judy (Future Dame Katherine Parkinson) floats around her kitchen making breakfast for her estate agent husband Johnny (Richard Harrington,) making sure he’s got everything ready so he’s not late for work. But before she can get on with the cleaning and tidying she needs to look up a couple of housekeeping tips on the internet, because Home, I’m Darling takes place in the present day. Having met through their shared love of all things ‘50s, the couple have decked out their house in authentic period designs and goods – even if that means a fridge that only works when it feels like it – decanting all their groceries into period-appropriate containers and, when Judy was made redundant three years ago, decided to take the experiment further by living their daily lives as if it was sixty years earlier, right down to the traditional gender roles.