Theatre review: Sting

Sophie Swithinbank's Sting draws parallels between the modern-day collusion of men and institutions against women experiencing abuse, and the historical persecution of women accused of witchcraft, through a pair of women conducting an academic study on just that subject: Lily (Phoebe Ladenburg) is a university lecturer specialising in the history of witch hunts, attempting to digitise a unique archive of cases and evidence. She hires a part-time assistant to help speed up the process, but doesn't get quite what she bargained for. Ash (Adelle Leonce) is qualified, educated and well-versed in the subject, but she hides it all a bit too well under hectic first impressions: She arrives for her first shift still drunk and exhausted from the night before's clubbing session, and just as she starts to settle in has a miscarriage.

Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing (RSC / RST)

Theatrical 2025 looks set to be memorable in part for Shakespeare productions whose high concepts tip over from the eccentric to the downright daft, and following Hamlet on the Titanic onto the RSC's main stage is Much Ado About Nothing, with Michael Longhurst's debut for the company moving the play from the world of soldiers and orange groves to that of professional footballers and WAGs. FC Messina have just won a European championship and the celebrations will be held at the home of the team sponsor, Leonato (understudy Nick Cavaliere,) a media mogul whose sports channels show all their games, with his niece Beatrice (Freema Agyeman) as one of the post-match interviewers. This is how she knows one of the players, Benedick (Nick Blood,) and the two have a brief sexual history that makes their encounters spiky to this day.

Theatre review: After the End

It's a truism by now that any show staged seems to end up with a (usually bleakly) ironic relevance to current events, more often than not a different one than was actually intended. When Theatre Royal Stratford East scheduled a revival of a play about two people trapped together in a nuclear fallout shelter, they probably imagined it would raise the odd wry smile of recognition from people who've spent the last two years in and out of various levels of lockdown; instead it's more likely to remind a London audience that the Express is currently running articles about whether the compete annihilation of the capital by nuclear bomb would negatively impact on house prices in Surrey. Dennis Kelly actually wrote After the End in response to 9/11, which is why the nuclear weapon that goes off just before the story starts is a terrorist attack by a suicide bomber rather than an act of aggression by a foreign power.