Theatre review: Thelma & Louise

35 years on from the 1991 film, original screenwriter Callie Khouri revisits Thelma & Louise as a stage musical, providing the book to Neko Case's new music and lyrics. When she gets the keys to a colleague's holiday cabin for the weekend, Louise (Rachel Tucker) invites her put-upon friend Thelma (Amy Lennox) to join her for a short break, but the road trip turns into a getaway drive when they stop off at a dive bar along the way. After dancing with a stranger in front of witnesses, Thelma is sexually assaulted by him, and her friend comes to the rescue - by shooting him dead. Knowing that having been seen with him, Thelma won't be believed when she says his attentions were unwanted, the two women go on the run to Mexico, but the more they try to stay under the radar the worse their unintended crime spree gets.

Theatre review: Night City

Max Wilkinson's Night City, which premieres at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Little Theatre, follows three London workers in the gig economy, and opens by warning us that one of them will wind up dead by the end of the story: Jack (Jack Ambrose) works for a fictional rideshare company, and despite finding out he has a congenital heart condition is, at the start of the play at least, the one out of the trio who most embraces the stressful, intense conditions of working on a zero-hours contract. One of his passengers is Tia (Bex Smith,) an aspiring writer who's only recently arrived in the city, and who's making ends meet at a café chain. The two start a casual relationship that grows into something more serious. Less directly connected to them is Tamara (Helena Pipe,) a carer whose employer has recently been bought out by a firm looking to maximise profits.

Theatre review: The Story

Sometimes when a new Artistic Director takes over a building it can feel like there's been a deliberate effort to get designers to reimagine how the stages can be used, and as we go into Indhu Rubasingham's second year at the National I can't help wondering if that's what we're getting there: After Electra/Persona's staircase going down to meet the front of the Lyttelton Stalls, Anna Fleischle cuts the front apron off the Olivier and adds a back wall to turn the vast stage into something comparatively intimate, a high school basketball court to frame Clint Dyer's production of The Story. This mix of the epic and the intimate is something that's reflected elsewhere in Tracey Scott Wilson's 2003 play, which has a large supporting ensemble building up the background of racial tensions ramping up in Philadelphia, but is ultimately focused on a quartet of journalists and the way they investigate them.

Theatre review: Man to Man

The Royal Court's 70th Anniversary season has included looking back at a few landmark productions, and in Man to Man we get the most direct revival yet, as the original creative team of Manfred Karge's monologue has returned, along with the original star who hasn't appeared on stage since she was last here in the same role: Tilda Swinton plays Max, an elderly man who takes us through the story of his life, revealing that he is, in fact, his own widow: Max died of cancer in a provincial part of Weimar Germany, leaving his young wife Ella without a source of income. So Ella buried Max in a grave with her own name on it, took on his identity and his job as a crane operator and lived through the rest of the 20th century as a man, very occasionally becoming Ella again if it was to her advantage.

Theatre review: Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy

It's been a summer of rewriting and reinterpreting the House of Atreus, and after Simon Stone gave us a version so loose it was unrecognisable, and Benedict Andrews a comparatively faithful one that took an abrupt turn into a different story altogether, Ava Pickett decides the only way left to take the story is Essex. Bloodsport Colon After Helen of Troy takes us to the part of the return from the Trojan War that doesn't get looked at much by the original Greek Tragedies: What happened when the woman an army spent a decade trying to bring home actually got there, and what did she think about that homecoming anyway? Helen (Michelle Dockery) was never abducted; she just met a charming and handsome foreign man called Paris in the pub, and realised that the life she'd been living wasn't the only option available to her.

Theatre review: Kimberly Akimbo

A multiple Tony-winner gets a comparatively low-key European premiere as David Lindsay-Abaire (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori's (music) Kimberly Akimbo opens at Hampstead Theatre in Michael Longhurst's glossy but intimate production. The title character turns 16 during the course of the story but she's played by 66-year-old Maria Friedman because Kimberly Levaco has a rare, unspecified genetic disorder that makes her age at 4-5 times the normal rate. And 16 is the average life expectancy of someone with her condition, so she has to deal with her own mortality at the same time as social awkwardness and first romances because she doesn't have long left. But rather than rest on what could be a rather maudlin subject, Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori have instead surrounded Kimberly with an anarchic family life that doesn't shy away from some darker moments but is also full of comedy and ridiculous adventures.

Theatre review: Electra/Persona

The latest production to employ the staging conceit of the lead actors alternating roles is Benedict Andrews' Electra Forward Slash Persona, a show that already has a pretty high concept as its starting point: Andrews' play is a mashup of Sophocles' Electra with Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, about the relationship between an actress who's suddenly turned mute and the nurse assigned to look after her. So the play opens with Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss asking an audience member in the front row to toss a coin (or in tonight's case, fling it to the ground in a wild panic.) Given the winner gets to choose which part she wants to play this would be a very easy way to rig the system and have the actors pre-agree who was going to do what*, but regardless of how much it's actually down to chance, tonight saw Blanchett opt to play Clytemnestra in the Greek Tragedy half of the evening.

Theatre review: A Month in the Country

Ivan Turgenev predates Chekhov by a few decades but his work certainly shows him as a likely influence on the more celebrated playwright's world of terminally disappointed upper middle classes turning ennui into their whole personality - or at least Brian Friel's adaptation of A Month in the Country suggests as much. Lyndsey Turner's production at the Donald and Margot Warehouse moves the action from sitting rooms to a greenhouse, which in Lesley Travers' design rises to reveal the household of Natalya (Sophie Okonedo) and her husband Arkady (Thomas Arnold.) The couple have a young son as well as a 17-year-old ward, Vera (Rachelle Diedericks,) and after a series of stuffy old men they have decided to employ a 24-year-old recent graduate from a lower-class background as their latest tutor.