Theatre review: As You Like It (RSC/RST)

Shakespeare plays run to a schedule similar to buses', so less than a month after the Globe's latest production confirmed why As You Like It is my favourite of the comedies, half the Artistic Director of the RSC comes along with his own take on why this is one of the most joyous of the plays. Not that Daniel Evans' production starts that way, with a monochrome design in which Colin Richmond's costumes in fascist black contrast with the clinical whiteness of Anisha Fields' set. This is the tyrannical domain of a Duke (Gary Wilmot) who recently ousted his own brother, and who entertains himself organising wrestling tournaments where fatalities are considered par for the course. Orlando (Elliot Barnes-Worrell,) a young nobleman also disinherited by his brother Oliver (Caleb Roberts,) takes his chances, and not only survives but wins the match - only for the Duke to banish him.

Theatre review: Ilford Boy

Queer actors turning playwright seem to be having a moment, and after the mixed bag of his debut BLACK SUPERHERO Danny Lee Wynter follows it up with a major step up that suggests he's as much of a natural writer as Jack Holden and Jordan Luke Gage. The titular character of the semi-autobiographical Ilford Boy is 14-year-old Ted (Leo Whitfield Harris,) who lives in East London in the middle of a multicultural family. It's 1996 and he and his mum Tillie (Ria Zmitrowicz) have been staying at the old family home, looking after her mother during her last days. Streisand-loving Nan has just died as the play starts, so the whole family is around arranging the funeral: His aunts Jackie (Jodie McNee) and her monosyllabic husband Trevor (Cary Crankson,) and heavily pregnant Ann (Charlotte Jaconelli,) married to the much more opinionated Raj (Aaron Gill.)

Theatre review: Some Woman

Regular readers of this blog may both recall that while I rate Anne-Marie Duff as an actress, as far as her taste in plays goes it's fair to say we don't see eye to eye: Based on most of the shows I've seen her in I suspect she's the sort of person to cite the word "harrowing" as the main, if not only, qualifier of a play's greatness. So I approached Helen Edmundson's Some Woman with my usual trepidation, as Duff plays Julie, a mother of two who, after her divorce from Richard (Geoffrey Streatfeild) gave up her professional ambitions to look after their two daughters. Now both grown up, the eldest Kate (Hannah Onslow) is a terrifyingly ambitious perfectionist who seems to view everything her mother does and says as a sign of weakness, while the youngest Ginny (Grace Doherty) has struggled with depression and an eating disorder but is now hoping she's strong enough to go away to university.

Theatre review: Martin Guerre

For what must surely be Matthew Warchus' final new production at the Old Vic he revisits Alain Boublil (book and lyrics,) Claude-Michel Schönberg (music and lyrics) and Stephen Clark's (lyrics) Martin Guerre in what is described as a new version of the musical and, frankly, when has this ever been staged in anything other than a rewritten version? I saw the original production 30 years ago and I still didn't quite see the first version: By the time I went in 1996, a couple of months after it premiered, it had already briefly closed and reopened once for a major rewrite and relaunch, which was evidently a lot more popular than the one critics had first seen, but still wasn't successful enough not to get completely retooled every time someone revived it. This time around Annabel Mutale Reed (lyrics) & Paul Hodge (lyrics and additional material) get added to the increasingly hefty roster of writers, to help turn the unwieldy epic into a 100-minute one-acter.

Theatre review: Heated Rivalry:The Unauthorized Musical Parody

In recent years quickly churned-out parody musicals based on the latest pop culture hit have become increasingly common and I've largely avoided them as likely to be cheap and easy cash-ins. In the case of Horny Hockey Show there's been multiple competing parodies at the same time, but with actual established musical theatre actor Zheng Xi Yong playing Shane Hollander I figured Dylan MarcAurele's (book, music and lyrics) Heated Rivalry Colon The Unauthorized Musical Parody seemed the most promising. And while I can't comment on the quality of any of its, well, rivals, I can say that Alan Kliffer's production is slick fun. Lots of studios have recently announced knock-off sports romances, invariably with straight couples in the lead, having presumably missed the point entirely and thought the big attraction was the hockey.

Theatre review: The Hungry Ghost

What does a monologue for two people look like? In Mei Leng Yew's debut play The Hungry Ghost Mei Mac plays the Girl, a character in her twenties trying to figure out how to balance her need for independence with the demands of her family and her Chinese heritage. She's recently moved out of her parents' home to move in with her girlfriend of three months, Naomi, except she's not told her parents that: Every morning she tells Naomi she's going to pick up more of her stuff, before creeping into the house to pretend she's been sleeping there all night. In the middle of all this upheaval she forgets her mother's warning that it's the Chinese month when ghosts roam the earth, and picks up a coin from the street - a trap laid by a ghost (Isabella Wei) who latches onto her, hanging around in the background at first but increasingly possessing and controlling her body.

Theatre review: Affluenza

Riverside Studios have taken the unusual step of launching a major season of five plays, importing off-Broadway director Andy Sandberg to curate the season and direct all the shows, as well as writing the opener. As far as I can tell Sandberg doesn't even seem to be a particularly big name in New York so I'm not sure what led to the red carpet being laid out for him to this extent - maybe the venue was hoping people would misread his name as Andy Samberg and get some ticket sales in? In any case I'm sure their confidence in him is justified, and he wouldn't open the season with a show whose title has already become a byword for disaster within days of its opening, would he? Affluenza opens in the aftermath of a car crash, in which 16-year-old drunk driver Dylan (Noah Schnapp) has caused a three-car collision, killing at least two people.

Theatre review: What The Animals Say

Playwright David Ireland has fans among Hollywood stars but the 50-seat Finborough Theatre remains a regular venue for some of his older work, and now that includes his debut play, which features a couple of men trying to impress one such star. But being a work by a writer who's inspired by the scars left by decades of sectarianism, the star in question is one who's not exactly known for embracing all peoples and beliefs. What The Animals Say features two characters who grew up in Northern Ireland but, having premiered at Òran Mór in Glasgow, its starting point is the Scottish city's own history of Catholic vs Protestant rivalry, most famously expressed through the two local football clubs. Eddie (Robbie Martin) is a professional footballer from Belfast, who after a fight with Alex Ferguson ended up transferred to Celtic - despite being a Protestant.

Theatre review: Hay Fever

Noël Coward's Hay Fever returns to the West End, this time in a production by Emily Burns whose star turn of Christine Baranski convinced me to book; but while I can't accuse it of not being an entertaining evening, I think this should probably be the last time I give this particular play a go. Baranski plays Judith Bliss, a recently-retired stage actress who made her name in torrid melodramas, and keeps threatening to return to them as her new life in the country has been boring her lately. So much so that she's invited a devoted young fan of hers, Sandy Tyrrell (Ash Hunter) to stay with her for the weekend. She hasn't forewarned her family though, and as it turns out all four of them have got surprise guests on the way - and all four of them have gone for a vague acquaintance some decades older or younger than them whom they plan on flirting with.

Theatre review: The Standard of Living

Combining arts, politics, economics and bisexuality, James Graham has already chosen John Maynard Keynes for Radio 4's Great Lives, it was only a matter of time before he wrote a play about him. The Standard of Living takes us from the start of the First World War to the fallout from the Second as the economist Keynes* (Rory Kinnear) starts to get the ear of the government despite being a conscientious objector. He spends his days with the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf (Naomi Frederick,) Vanessa Bell (Claire Price) and his ex, Lytton Strachey (Pip Carter,) and this immersion in the world of the arts combines with his economic theories when he manages to convince an already debt-ridden government to invest in the art collection of the recently-deceased French painter Edgar Degas.

Theatre review: Table 17

Douglas Lyons' Table 17 opens with something of a personal theatrical nightmare for me: An announcement informing the audience that any time a character in the play asks a question, we are very much expected to answer it. The effect this has probably varies from performance to performance but, combined with the glitterball and pre-show soundtrack of hen night favourites, tonight it resulted in an evening of whooping, heckling, gasping, shrieking and yaaaas queening to make a 1980s American sitcom audience sound demure. And that was just the teenage boys. The question is, under the noise, did the show itself have much to say? A couple of years after their breakup, Dallas (Jamael Westman) has invited his ex-fiancée Jada (Marisha Wallace) out for a drink. We open with Jada fretting over what to wear for an evening that may or may not be a date.

Theatre review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Back to @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's learnt almost half the moves to the "Tragedy" dance, and a new revival of one of the definitive 20th century American classics. In Edward Albee's pitch-black 1962 tragicomedy Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Question Mark Gillian Anderson plays Martha, the daughter of the elderly president of a university. Her husband George (Billy Crudup) is a lecturer in the History department, briefly its head but only when all his other colleagues went off to World War II. Other than that it's been a pretty mediocre career, despite his marriage which was, at least partly, originally a strategic one to help him advance. The fact that it hasn't is just one of the disappointments that has made the relationship a sharp, bitter one, but strangely resilient.