Theatre review: The Habits

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Hampstead invites the official critics in next week.

I imagine Stranger Things has caused something of a Dungeons & Dragons resurgence in recent years; apparently lockdown saw games spring up as well, which is where Jack Bradfield got the idea for The Habits, set in a failing board game-themed café in Bromley. Owner Dennis (Paul Thornley) had been hoping to mostly host the role-playing games he fondly remembers from his teen years, but has ended up surrounded by Monopoly players if anyone turns up at all; so he's excited to see a young group set up a weekly D&D game. But there's a sad reason behind these meetings: 16-year-old Jess' (Ruby Stokes) brother died a few months ago, and his best friend Milo (Jamie Bisping) and ex-girlfriend Maryn (Sara Hazemi) have agreed to meet her every week, to help her move on by playing the game her brother loved.

Theatre review: KENREX

My online Show of the Year 2021 and even better live in 2022, nobody could accuse Cruise of lacking in ambition, but that's how its creator Jack Holden's follow-up makes it feel. Less obviously personal but with much more of an epic scope, KENREX takes Holden's monologue-with-songs format and applies it to a true crime documentary, one of those violent stories of isolated and twisted Americana. The isolated place in question is Skidmore, a Missouri town so small and remote it doesn't have a sheriff - if anyone makes a 911 call it'll take an hour for the police to turn up. This is something that local bully Ken Rex McElroy has taken advantage of throughout the 1970s, and his reign of terror has included violence, physical and sexual assault, arson, killing pets, theft of livestock, and general menace and intimidation of the town's population.

Theatre review: Churchill in Moscow

Howard Brenton's history plays have an eclectic scope that's previously seen him tackle everything from Ancient Greek philosophers to the Partition of India. He's also dealt with the life of Harold Macmillan, but for his latest play he goes for the British Prime Minister who must have been interpreted on stage and screen more than any other, as Roger Allam plays the title role in Churchill in Moscow (he plays Churchill, not Moscow.) Set in 1942, things look particularly dark for the Allies as the Nazis are making inroads into Russia and approaching Stalingrad. Meanwhile British forces have been depleted to the point that they'd be wiped out instantly if they attempted to invade Europe via the Channel - US troops will eventually supplement them, but they're not really feeling it just yet. Winston Churchill is on a secret diplomatic mission to Moscow to inform Joseph Stalin (Peter Forbes) of the bad news that D-day won't come until at least the next year.

Theatre review: Richard II (Bridge Theatre)

Never mind his global fanbase post-Bridgerton and Wicked, those of us who frequent London theatre have wanted to see Jonathan Bailey's Dick for years. Bailey returns to Shakespeare and to director Nicholas Hytner for the Bridge's in-the-round Richard II, in which a capricious king who has never doubted his divine right to rule has tanked England's finances, raising money for wars that never happen, then spending it on himself while the country's military reputation becomes an embarrassment. The Lords might put up with this to avoid upending centuries of tradition, but Richard makes the mistake of making things personal: Intervening in a dispute between Henry Bullingbrook (Royce Pierreson) and Thomas Mowbray (Phoenix Di Sebastiani,) he banishes both - essentially for disrespecting him. He later adds injury to insult when Henry's father John of Gaunt (Nick Sampson) dies, and Richard commandeers his inheritance to finance one of his doomed expeditions.

Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing(Jamie Lloyd Company / Theatre Royal Drury Lane)

I went on quite a bit in my review of Jamie Lloyd's Tempest about the fact that the entire production seemed to exist only to satisfy an obscure beef that His Exalted Brittanic Excellency, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB had with a dead man, and the way that was reflected in a production the director's heart didn't seem to be in. At least, whatever other reservations I might have with the second half of this Shakespeare season at Drury Lane, Lloyd's Much Ado About Nothing has the feel of a show he actually had an idea for. Another heavily edited text doesn't only lose a whole swathe of characters but also the play's military context: Soutra Gilmour's design leaves the huge stage mostly bare except for constantly-falling pink confetti, turning it into the dance floor of an 80's/90's- themed disco (although the amount of plot that's dependant on texts and people checking each other's Instagrams suggest we're in the present day.)

Theatre review: More Life

Billed as a sci-fi gothic horror, Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman's More Life is a riff on Frankenstein (something it acknowledges several times) set in 2075, when medical advances have allowed those who can afford them to slow down the ageing process by a couple of deacdes, but haven't quite eliminated human mortality altogether yet. But the next step towards that might just have been taken: Alison Halstead plays a synthetic human that doesn't need to eat, sleep or breathe. Vic (Marc Elliott) and his assistant Mike (Lewis Mackinnon) now need to find the right consciousness to animate it, out of many brains donated to their shadowy organisation over the years. Many can't handle the realisation that they've died and been brought back in a new body, but eventually the scientists find Bridget, a young woman who died in a car crash in 2026 (caused by one of the company's own prototype driverless cars.) A few adjustments to the code that stores her consciousness, and she's ready for a new life.

Theatre review: Hamlet (RSC / RST)

It's 14 years since Rupert Goold last worked at the RSC, and almost a decade since he last directed a Shakespeare play. Now he returns to close off the new leadership's first year in the main house, and in his time away the director who brought us horror movie Macbeth, emo Romeo & Juliet and The Merchant of Vegas hasn't forgotten how to come up with a high concept. Although whether he can still pull the concept off might be a matter of opinion. Goold brings with him one of his big discoveries from his time at the Almeida, throwing Luke Thallon into the deep end for his first professional Shakespeare role as Hamlet. The titular character is Prince of Denmark, having recently lost his father but not succeeded him as king. That title has gone to his uncle Claudius (Jared Harris,) who as well as his brother's crown has also claimed his widow: Weeks after the old king's funeral Claudius has married Hamlet's mother Gertrude (Nancy Carroll.)

Theatre review: Three Sisters

Last winter season saw the Swanamaker take a successful first crack at Ibsen; this year, and in the annual onstage appearance by the Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe adds Chekhov to the repertory. In a remote part of Russia the titular Three Sisters live in the house their father bought when he was appointed commander of the resident military garrison. A year after his death, his children are still there, talking about moving back to Moscow but tied to the area by a few circumstances. Over the next five years, instead of freeing themselves from them, they'll end up with ever more reasons they can't escape the depressing small town they only ever thought was a stopgap. Olga is the eldest, the schoolteacher who has little love for the job and certainly doesn't see it as a career she'll progress in.

Theatre review: Scissorhandz

Another day, another jukebox musical movie parody transfers from the US to London. And where I thought New York hit Titaníque's confidence in going straight for the West End was warranted, LA export Scissorhandz landing at the more modest Southwark Playhouse was probably also wise: Its underlying theme could not be more relevant to the current darkest timeline, but it's just a shame the creatives who came up with the idea couldn't follow through on its promise. Based, of course, on Tim Burton's 1990 suburban fairytale satire Edward Scissorhands - which has already inspired a Matthew Bourne ballet - Bradley Bredeweg's version ditches the "Edward" part to make Scissorhandz (understudy Lauren Jones) a non-binary humanoid creature, built by The Inventor (Dionne Gipson) out of various spare parts. But their mother dies before replacing the scissors with real hands, and Scissorhandz is left alone in her mansion/lab.

Theatre review: Elektra

My second star-led Sophocles in the space of a week provides some interesting points to compare and contrast with Oedipus: Both revivals use translations that stick pretty closely to the rules, format and structure of the original conventions. But where that show was dominated by its visuals, this one is all about the sounds. And while anyone unfamiliar with Greek mythology will get a pretty clear telling of the story South of the river, they'll probably find themselves in somewhat muddier waters in the West End. Celebrity Dairy Product Brie Larson leads Daniel Fish's production of Elektra as the daughter of Agamemnon who's in mourning for her father, murdered by her mother Clytemnestra (Stockard Channing) and her lover Aegisthus (Greg Hicks.) This is the part of the myth that's covered in the middle play of the Oresteia, but here it's entirely told from Elektra's point of view, and she's leaving out some fairly important details.

Theatre review: East is South

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Hampstead Theatre invites the critics in next week.

After The Invention of Love saw Hampstead Theatre's main stage get caught up in classical analysis for a couple of hours, Beau Willimon's East is South threatens to do the same thing but with theology. In a secretive facility somewhere under an American desert, international teams of computer coders have been developing "Aggie," an AI more powerful than any seen yet - one that may not only end up passing for real human intelligence, but supercede it. Developers work in pairs and no new code can be approved without checks by multiple teams, but for all the security checks there's been a breach that might see Aggie escape onto the Internet. Lena (Kaya Scoledario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are one of the teams working on the kill switch, the code that can shut down the programme if it gets too powerful and out of control.

Theatre review: Oedipus (Old Vic)

Oedipus cements his place as London's favourite motherfucker by returning with a new face mere weeks after he finished appearing in the guise of Mark Strong, while the Old Vic continues to pair Indira Varma with Bond villains: She plays Jocasta in Ella Hickson's new version of Oedipus, opposite Rami Malek as the titular king. A couple of decades earlier, the Corinthian prince arrived in Thebes and solved the riddle of the Sphinx that had been tormenting its people. The hero of the hour, he married the newly-widowed queen Jocasta, becoming king of the city and ruling successfully while raising a young family. But now a drought has brought misery back to the citizens and, supported by his queen, he proposes an extreme solution: Abandon the ravaged land completely, and move the entire city to a place that can actually support them.

Theatre review: Play On!

The onslaught of multiple Twelfth Nights continues with a twist, as Shakespeare's mid-career comedy provides the basic plot inspiration for Talawa's Duke Ellington jukebox musical, Play On Exclamation Mark. Set in Harlem's Cotton Club in the 1920s, Sheldon Epps (concept) and Cheryl L.West (book) bring Viola (Tsemaye Bob-Egbe) to the club to try her luck as a songwriter. But her uncle Jester (Llewellyn Jamal) informs her that she won't convince anyone to listen to her music because women are famously incapable of writing songs. To get the legendary Duke (Earl Gregory) to consider her, Viola dresses as a man with the hastily-acquired pseudonym of Vyman, and her songs impress the Duke so much he employs "him" to serenade a disinterested lover on his behalf: Lady Liv (KoKo Alexandra,) the club's resident diva.

Theatre review: Summer 1954

The Browning Version is widely considered one of Terence Rattigan's masterpieces, but as a one-act play it seems to cause a lot of trouble for producers trying to pair it with something else as a double bill (Rattigan's own original choice of companion piece, Harlequinade, seems to be generally ruled out for being both too inferior and too big a shift in mood to work.) James Dacre's touring production Summer 1954 has mixed and matched it with a short from another of the playwright's double bills, Separate Tables, and so the new pairing opens at a Bournemouth hotel where most of the rooms are taken by semi-permanent residents. In Table Number Seven Siân Phillips plays the imperious Mrs Railton-Bell, who learns from the local paper that another resident, Major Pollock (Nathaniel Parker) isn't quite who he says he is.

Theatre review: Inside No.9 - Stage/Fright

"Janette Krankie wouldn't look us in the eye."

"That's 'cause she's only 4ft."

Last year Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's comedy/horror anthology Inside No.9 ended after, somewhat inevitably, 9 series, but as a final farewell to the show the writer/stars have reunited for a stage version, Stage/Fright. This is a mix of greatest hits of the series itself, and new material that could only work on stage, and although the TV show did experiment with various genres outside of its original Tales of the Unexpected roots, this new stage extension to the canon focuses on the queasy mix of sometimes cheesy comedy and jump-scare horror that feels like the series' purest form (so in the unlikely event that anyone was hoping for the utter bleakness of something like "The Last Weekend" or "The Trolley Problem" drawn out to two-and-a-half hours, I guess they'll be disappointed.)

Stage-to-screen review: Death of England: Closing Time

The show I was due to see tonight got cancelled at the last minute, so I replaced it with another show that I'd missed the first time, and that I'd been keeping in my back pocket for just such an occasion: I had a ticket to Death of England: Closing Time's premiere at the Dorfman in 2023, but my performance got cancelled when Jo Martin fell ill. I wasn't too worried about missing the latest part of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' increasingly epic project as I knew it would turn up on NTatHome sooner or later, which it now has: It played in rep as part of a trilogy (the made-for-TV Face to Face seems to have been quietly forgotten) that played in rep last year at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's working on a gag about what "Zig-A-Zig-Ah" means that it'll find a punchline for any day now.

Theatre review: Cymbeline(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

If Love's Labour's Lost can feel like the young Shakespeare workshopping setpieces he would perfect later in his career, Cymbeline could be the older playwright collecting every mad idea he couldn't fit into an earlier play, then throwing them all together to see what happens. The story of Roman Britain sees Princess Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks) separated from her exiled spouse, to be reunited only after a deranged fairytale quest that includes a man hiding in a trunk, a health tonic that's actually a deadly poison that's actually just a sleeping draught, meeting a pair of siblings she never knew existed, and a headless corpse largely played for laughs. The Swanamaker's latest take on the play gender-flips a lot of characters including the titular king; I understand the desire for a powerful female leader figure, but it feels a bit of a pyrrhic victory for that leader to struggle to make an impression because she spends the whole play on more sedatives than a 1980s soap opera housewife.

Theatre review: A Good House

If the Royal Court Upstairs has a history of making you feel very nervous about any play featuring a baby, the main Downstairs theatre can give you déjà vu with a satire on race relations set firmly in the suburbs, whose communities appear happily integrated on a surface that's easily scratched away. If Clybourne Park had over fifty years of history to play with, Amy Jephta's A Good House deals with a place where the very first roots of racial integration are only three decades old: The aptly-named Stillwater is an affluent new-build suburb of Johannesburg, where Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) were early buyers, and two years on remain the only black residents. Meanwhile, yoga instructor Jess (Robyn Rainsford) and her husband Andrew (Kai Luke Brummer) moved in a couple of months ago, paying a much higher price which means all their money is now tied up in the house.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night (RSC / RST)

The RSC's apparent reverse-Globe scheduling policy of rarer Shakespeare plays in the summer and the most famous ones in winter continues with Twelfth Night as the holiday show. Prasanna Puwanarajah's production even embraces the play's seasonal title with a few Christmas songs and decorations - all fairly subtle though, this story does after all feature a high-profile Puritan, and they were famously not big fans of Christmas. In fact I was meant to see this closer to the season itself but with the train service between That London and Stratford-upon-Avon being nonexistent for most of this month I had to reschedule to the final matinée: I'd rather not have to publish a review after the show's closed but needs must when Chiltern Railways exists. Opening not with the big storm but with Gwyneth Keyworth's Viola spluttering out of the water, the sense of understatement extends from the Christmas trimmings to many elements of the play.

Theatre review: An Interrogation

Cameron (Jamie Ballard) is the founder and CEO of a successful consultancy firm with government contacts; he's got a ruthless reputation tempered with charity work, and he spends most weekends looking after his aging mother. But police officer Ruth (Rosie Sheehy) is pretty convinced his mild image is distracting from more than just the large swathes of redundancies his company has been responsible for: She also believes that he kidnapped and murdered one of his employees a few months back. Now another young woman is missing, and if it's the work of the same person she might have been kept alive for up to 72 hours. The Reading police are under pressure to find the second victim while she's still alive, and with hours to go Ruth has been given the chance to try out her hunch: With her boss watching from a nearby room, she'll interview Cameron alone.