Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare's Globe)

If A Midsummer Night's Dream is the Open Air Theatre's signature Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing feels like it occupies a very similar place at the Globe. I could definitely do with longer gaps between new productions - they do start to blend into each other in my memory and I sometimes wish for a bit more distance from the last one to let the next fresh take make its mark - but while some have been better than others the venue has never served up a completely duff one as long as I've been going there. Chelsea Walker's production doesn't buck that trend either: Not a particularly high-concept one apart from Sami Fendall's designs taking a lot of inspiration from the weddings the plot revolves around - a lot of white, floral displays and the musicians decked out as a wedding band, playing old standards that punctuate the comedy and sometimes troll the characters.

Theatre review: Good Night, Oscar

Documenting perhaps the first, definitely not the last, nervous breakdown on live TV, Doug Wright's Good Night, Oscar goes behind the scenes of an episode of The Tonight Show from 1958. Moving from its usual New York home to Hollywood for a week, the show is hoping for a ratings smash, and host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to open with one of his own favourite regular guests, who always gets a big audience reaction: Actor and musician Oscar Levant (Sean Hayes,) who's become as well known for his near-the-knuckle witticisms and acerbic comments as he has for his virtuoso piano-playing, where he specialises in the works of his old friend George Gershwin. Oscar is often fashionably late, but with this episode coming from the headquarters Jack has the network head himself, Bob Sarnoff (Richard Katz) pressuring him to find a last-minute replacement.

Theatre review: All's Well That Ends Well(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

The latest winter season at Shakespeare's Globe will include a major playwright who's never appeared in the Swanamaker before, but first two Shakespeares both of which have already made a previous appearance in the candlelit Playhouse; and from my own experience All's Well That Ends Well for one certainly seems to work better indoors than outdoors. Chelsea Walker's production is an edited, speedy one that comes in at a little over two hours, and if it loses anything in clarity of storytelling it gains in clarity of character development. It doesn't make the leads any less icky, but it does eliminate some of the tonal whiplash in the way they're portrayed. Helen (Ruby Bentall) is the daughter of a recently-deceased doctor, who travels to Paris to treat the dying King (Richard Katz) with one of the miracle cures she inherited from him.

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: Love and Other Acts of Violence

The Donald and Margot Warehouse only now reopens its venue, having used lockdown as an opportunity to do another refurbishment of the building, in part to improve accessibility. While the finishing touches were put on they of course had their summer West End residency with four versions of Constellations, and in the first new show back in Seven Dials director Elayce Ismail often nods to Michael Longhurst's now-famous staging, with a couple meeting and falling in love on a fairly bare stage, the lights flashing on and off quickly to take us from one scene to the next. But Love and Other Acts of Violence is a new play by Cordelia Lynn, a writer with a history of presenting us with horrors under a deceptively smiley face, and her couple inhabit only one reality, that's going to take them to some dark places. The unnamed couple first meet as graduate students: Tom Mothersdale's Him is an aspiring writer and enthusiastic political activist; Abigail Weinstock's Her is a gifted physicist.

Theatre review: Bartholomew Fair

The 1980s Canadian sprinter wasn’t the first Ben Jo(h)nson to very obviously be on drugs, as evidenced by the Jacobean playwright’s Bartholomew Fair. Jonson’s comedies tend to be madcap affairs with a lot of grotesque characters getting themselves tied up into convoluted plots and gulled by con-men. Bartholomew Fair’s slice-of-life look at the characters who populate the titular fair features all of this, but without even the suggestion of a coherent plot holding it all together – as Phill put it, if someone asked what happened in the play, you’d have to answer “everything.” But a couple of plotlines do just about start to make sense: Bartholomew Cokes (Zach Wyatt) is due to get married on the feast day of the saint who bears his name and, laden with cash, is spending the day at the celebratory market (in what is now Spitalfields,) keen to stock up on food and luxuries for the wedding day.

Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare's Globe)

Despite being a spin-off for one of Shakespeare’s best-loved characters, The Merry Wives of Windsor’s main claim to fame is a highly dubious story about Queen Elizabeth I wanting to see “Falstaff in love” (which if it were true would surely have seen Shakespeare at the very least spend some time in the stocks because love… ain’t really what Falstaff’s in here*.) Not that the play’s one of the harder comedies to get a laugh out of, but it’s rarely one of the big hitters either. Now Elle While’s production for Shakespeare’s Globe comes along to make a solid case for this proto-sex farce as, if far from the subtlest of comedies, one that can deliver reliable laughs all evening. It doesn’t hurt that While has brought back, from last year’s rep company, someone whose name in the casting announcement instantly makes a production a must-see: Pearce Quigley plays Sir John Falstaff, the viciously amoral but strangely likeable knight from the Henry IV plays.

Theatre review: As You Like It (Shakespeare's Globe)

The second show from the Globe’s new Michelle Terry-led ensemble is As You Like It, nominally paired with the Hamlet they’re playing it in rep with as “sibling” plays; to be honest what connections the company have found between the plays aren’t too obviously apparent, but if it doesn’t really come across as a double bill that’s no bad thing because where Hamlet was underwhelming, As You Like It is, well, much more like it. Although the idea of gender-blind casting has been gaining traction in recent years, it’s not often it feels as natural as in these ensemble shows – there tends to be the feel of it mainly being male roles assigned to women to redress the gender imbalance, with the odd recasting the other way so it’s not a box-ticking exercise. Not so in these plays, and particularly this one, where the casting announcement was exciting because it seemed more genuinely gender-blind than anything I’ve seen before: Regardless of gender, the roles assigned seemed like ones I thought would be an interesting match to that particular actor.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Shakespeare's Globe)

After the “teaser” of the touring Twelfth Night and Shrew, it’s time for the main season as Michelle Terry takes over as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Not only has the venue gone back to having an actor in charge (the first one to hold the post will be returning later in the summer) but the idea of the productions being “actor-led” has been heavily promoted leading up to her first season; in fact the new Globe Ensemble’s first pair of productions were originally announced as being put together without a director, although Federay Holmes and Elle While have since been brought in to fulfil that role. This reliance on actor input is apparent, in both positive and negative ways, in the opening show of the Terry era, and she’s come straight in to take on a challenge, playing the title role in Hamlet*. The Prince of Denmark is in mourning two months after the sudden death of his father, but the royal court around him has already moved on.

Theatre review: The Divide

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: A combination of major changes since the play was premiered last year, and this London run being very short, means The Divide is in the unusual situation of its entire Old Vic run being technically classed as previews.

Alan Ayckbourn's latest play is certainly ambitious, something that's given it a chequered history at the Old Vic even before it arrived there: The Divide premiered at last year's Edinburgh Festival as a two-part event along the lines of Angels in America or Harry Potter, and went on sale in London as two parts as well. But the unimpressed reception it received in August meant that, in the months before it resurfaced, Annabel Bolton's production underwent major changes, notably cutting two of its six hours, now fitting into one (very long) performance. One of Ayckbourn's occasional moves away from comedies of manners towards science fiction, the play has the feel of a dystopian YA novel, albeit one very low on action. The Divide takes place at some point in the future, the world having undergone an apocalyptic event that's reset the calendars - we're now over a hundred years AP, or "After Plague."

Theatre review: The Lorax

The colourful worlds and wacky rhymes of Dr. Seuss would make him seem a natural fit for stage adaptation, but his books are so short that expanding his stories to make a full-length show can't be easy without losing a lot of their charm. David Greig, though, has succeeded in giving new life to one of the writer's most heartfelt stories, as he brings a musical version of The Lorax to the Old Vic. In this expanded version of the environmental fable, the Once-ler (Simon Paisley Day) is a dreamer who travels the world hoping and failing to invent something amazing, until he stumbles upon a forest of colourful Truffula trees, that produce an incredibly soft and fluffy wool. Knitting it into a shapeless thing he calls a thneed, it becomes a must-have accessory despite nobody being quite sure what it is. He builds a thneed factory and a town supported by its economy, ignoring the warnings of the Lorax (voiced by Simon Lipkin,) a woodland creature responsible for the trees and worried about what'll happen when the Once-ler starts chopping them down.

Theatre review: Richard II (Shakespeare's Globe)

Back to the Globe for the second night in a row, and right back to the beginning of the octet that ends with Richard III. In fact I can now say I've seen all of Shakespeare's Histories at this venue, now that Richard II has been added to the list. Charles Edwards plays King Richard, who was crowned as a child - in fact Simon Godwin's production opens with the additional scene of the young Richard's (Thomas Ashdown or Frederick Neilson) coronation. On a golden throne on a golden stage, he's showered with golden confetti that'll probably be stuck in the theatre's nooks and crannies for years to come (I know from groundlings that it's been stuck in their nooks and crannies for a while.) All this bling is in honour of a king who's grown up with the certain knowledge that his power is god-given, and who behaves accordingly. But when he banishes and disinherits his cousin Bolingbroke (David Sturzaker,) he finds that he's pushed the wrong man around.

Theatre review: The Master and Margarita

I was a rare voice of dissent among the praise for Complicite's A Disappearing Number, so wasn't sure if I fancied the company's latest venture, The Master and Margarita. But with the excellent Sinéad Matthews in one of the title roles, and Big Favourite Round These Parts Henry Pettigrew in the ensemble, I decided to give it a chance. Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical novel about the Devil visiting Soviet-era Moscow is apparently famously impenetrable (I haven't read it myself) and so it is with Simon McBurney's stage adaptation. Its Möbius plot encompasses two writers, both inspired to write identical stories that are essentially the Gospel According to Pontius Pilate, only for both to have them rejected by the authorities for their suggestion that Jesus/Yeshua actually existed. There's also a demonic variety show, a ball attended by history's most notorious killers, and the titular doomed affair.