Theatre review: As You Like It (National Theatre)

With Rufus Norris, by his own admission, nowhere near as strong on the classics as his predecessor and relying heavily on advice from his associates, the choice of As You Like It as the first Shakespeare play of his tenure was greeted as something of a predictably safe choice. Happily this isn't something that extends to Polly Findlay's production which, though far from the funniest version of the play I've ever seen, may be one of the most charming and visually inventive. The setting is the court of a usurping duke - here a modern-day stock trading office - whose daughter Celia (Patsy Ferran) has been allowed to keep her cousin Rosalind (Rosalie Craig) as a companion. But Duke Frederick's (Leo Wringer) moods are unpredictable, and he decides to banish Rosalind. She and Celia escape to the forest, taking with them the clown Touchstone (Mark Benton.)

Theatre review: Hobson's Choice

Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice is apparently both a GCSE text and an old stalwart of regional rep. As a result it's the sort of play whose title I'm familiar with but I've never actually seen. Written in 1915 but set in Victorian Salford, it gets a further time shift in Nadia Fall's production in Regent's Park, which moves the action to the 1960s - probably as late as you could take its title character's attitudes. The affable Mark Benton plays against type as Henry Horatio Hobson, who's run his own shoe shop for years. But since the death of his wife, his daughters Maggie (Jodie McNee,) Alice (Nadia Clifford) and Vickey (Hannah Britland) have been running the place for no wages, while he spends his days in the local pub, the Moonraker's¹. But business is booming, because in the basement workshop is young shoemaker Willie Mossop (Big Favourite Round These Parts Karl Davies) whose boots are so good all the wealthier ladies of Salford flock to the shop.

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Filter / Lyric Hammersmith)

They do say you shouldn't choose which shows to see solely on the basis of one cast member, and it can backfire. After having happily decided to give Filter's productions a miss in future, I relented for their new A Midsummer Night's Dream as Rhys Rusbatch was in it. Unfortunately the production seems to have shed him somewhere along the tour and it arrives at the Lyric Hammersmith without him. So what would I make of the latest Shakespeare adaptation from a company whose work I've found very problematic in the past?

Things don't start well as Ed Gaughan's Peter Quince opens the show with a bit of stand-up that uses the play's royal wedding as a prompt for such unique, never-before-made observations as the fact that the Royal Family is German, and that Camilla Parker-Bowles looks a bit like a horse. Once we get going properly though, the company seem to have got over, for now at least, some of the issues I've objected to in the past. Most importantly, though still inventive and silly, I no longer got the impression that Filter were having an onstage party for their own benefit, and should the audience happen to enjoy it as well, that's incidental.