Theatre review: The Good Person of Szechwan

The Lyric Hammersmith's programming is currently giving me flashbacks to my drama degree, and particularly playwrights who, if you'd believed my course, are produced way more regularly than they actually are. After Dario Fo and Franca Rame it's the turn of Bertolt Brecht, and his political morality tale The Good Person of Szechwan. Three gods come to Earth on a mission to find a good person: If there isn't at least one left in the world, they won't be able to avert an apocalyptic flood that will wipe out the unworthy mankind. They've landed in a very poor district, where people are too busy trying to keep themselves and their families alive to worry about anyone else, but prostitute Shen Te (Ami Tredrea) has a reputation for generosity, and is chosen as the experiment's subject. The gods give her $1000 to set her up for the future, and she uses it to buy a tobacconist's shop.

Stage-to-screen review: Macbeth (Shakespeare's Globe / Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank)

Playing Shakespeare is the Globe and Deutsche Bank's annual education programme tying in with the GCSE curriculum, creating 90-minute productions aimed at teenagers. Tickets are exclusively given free to schools, and while it's not entirely impossible for regular audience members to get hold of them - I know people who've raved about past productions' playful, irreverent tone - I've never managed to get round to one. Now this year's production, which played in February and March just before the theatres closed, is the latest addition to the Globe's online offerings on YouTube. Ekow Quartey plays the title role in Cressida Brown's modern dress production of Macbeth, as the previously loyal Scottish general whose ambition is fired up by a supernatural prophecy, kills the king and steals his throne, only to find that having unleashed his inner darkness he becomes a tyrant with enemies everywhere.

Theatre review: The King of Hell's Palace

The last in September's trio of new Artistic Directors to make their debut is Roxana Silbert, another experienced hand who comes to Hampstead straight from Birmingham. She breaks with the unwritten convention by not directing the season opener herself, in fact she won't be taking the wheel until the fourth main-house show of her tenure. Instead former RSC boss Michael Boyd directs The King of Hell's Palace - a challenging choice of opener but an exciting prospect as far as I'm concerned: Writer Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig was behind Snow In Midsummer, which I was completely smitten with a few years ago. This time around there's a more brutally down-to-earth subject matter, although death remains a common denominator as the early days of China taking on the West at its own capitalist game in the 1990s see a medical scandal and huge cover-up rock the impoverished countryside.