Theatre review: Till The Stars Come Down

Beth Steel's Till The Stars Come Down has been compared to Chekhov, and though it owes as much to Coronation Street it does centre on three sisters: In a Northern former coalmining town Hazel (Lucy Black) and Maggie (Aisling Loftus) are helping youngest sister Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) get ready for her wedding. While Hazel lives down the road with her husband John (Adrian Bower) and teenage daughters Leanne (Ruby Thompson) and Sarah (Cadence Williams, alternating with Lillie Babb and Elodie Blomfield,) and Maggie rather abruptly moved away for work some months earlier, Sylvia has stayed at home ever since their mother's death, keeping their father Tony (Alan Williams) company. So her wedding represents both moving on from the past, and a day where she can be the focus of attention rather than the supportive one, but she's got a bad feeling something's going to go wrong.

Theatre review: Rhinoceros

Omar Elerian continues to be a big advocate of Eugène Ionesco's work, returning to the Almeida after The Chairs to adapt and direct Rhinoceros, a play whose wildness, chaos and horrors mirror the real-life situations it satirises. A quiet Sunday in a small village that may or may not be in France is disrupted when a rhinoceros charges through the square, later followed by a second one (or the same one doing a loop.) Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù plays Berenger, who's already got problems with alcohol before the play starts, and is unlikely to find it easier to cope once the rhinos start arriving - particularly as everyone else in town seems to view them as a minor inconvenience at most. But as the week goes on and everyone tries to get back to work, things are further disrupted as it becomes apparent this isn't an incursion of pachiderms from outside: The human residents are, one by one, turning into rhinos.

Theatre review: The Invention of Love

Crazy to think Tom Stoppard has spent an entire career writing plays about human beings, despite all the evidence suggesting he's never met one. In fact despite having enjoyed some of his work it may be time to add him to my very short list of creatives I've given enough chances to for one lifetime, as The Invention of Love is based around a premise that should be effortlessly moving, but ends up far too interested in deconstructing Catullus to get round to deconstructing emotions: Simon Russell Beale plays A E Housman, the Victorian poet and classicist who, by the time of his death, seems to have decided that the two pursuits don't really go together, as one requires rules, facts and logic to be set aside in favour of emotional truth, while the other involves picking apart every comma in the name of strict accuracy.

Radio review: Love and Information

Back to my occasional reviews of radio adaptations of stage work, where BBC Radio 3's recent production of Love and Information is the first audio adaptation, and 12 years seems like a surprisingly long time to wait to give it that treatment: After all, Caryl Churchill's 2012 play is an experiment in form that requires all kinds of resources for a live revival, that are a lot easier to get around on radio, where sketch shows are common. And that's essentially the format Churchill used for this play, whose cast very quickly run their way through more than a hundred characters in over fifty scenes that are rarely as long as two minutes, and can be as short as a single sneeze. As an audience member, one advantage this has is that I was able to focus entirely on the scenes and not the staging - I remember the original production at the Royal Court as being brilliant, but it was impossible not to be slightly distracted by the impressively slick scene changes.

Theatre review: Dr Semmelweis

After his return to Jerusalem was a sell-out, there was little question that another recent Mark Rylance project would make its way to the West End as well: Stephen Brown's Dr Semmelweis, first seen at the Bristol Old Vic, also gives Rylance a co-writing credit as it was apparently his idea to dramatise the story of an obstetrician who saw the importance of hygiene in medicine decades before anyone understood bacteria, and was laughed and bullied out of his profession for it. I'm not sure it's entirely in character for Rylance to side with the latest medical discoveries over, say, fresh air and garlic; then again the play also shows Ignaz Semmelweis as a paranoid conspiracy theorist so it's six of one half a dozen of the other. The play begins in the middle of the story, with Semmelweis losing his mind, but retaining its sharpness in some ways.

Theatre review: Gundog

Simon Longman’s pastoral nightmare Gundog is the final Upstairs show in the current Royal Court season (surely a new announcement is overdue?) and once again sees Vicky Featherstone channel something of the spirit of Edward Bond in this space: After the dead baby play we now get something that, though in some ways effective, in others comes perilously close to misery porn. Becky (Ria Zmitrowicz) and Anna (Rochenda Sandall) are sisters living on desolate land in the middle of nowhere. They come from a family of sheep-farmers, but after the deaths of their parents, and an infection that took out most of their flock, they have nothing left. Not knowing any other way of life they now steal a few pregnant ewes from other flocks they hope nobody will miss, and just about subsist on the money they get from slaughtering and selling the lambs.

Theatre review: Mary Stuart

My first theatre trip of 2017 should have been one of my last of 2016, but the performance I was due to see was one of several cancelled due to cast illness - presumably the gastroenteritis that's knocked out half the West End and got me last month as well. But everyone's back on their feet now for the latest of Robert Icke's classic reinventions at the Almeida, Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart. In the battle of wills between the last Tudor monarch and her great rival, Icke sees the women as two sides of the same coin - literally, as two actresses share both roles, with a coin spun at the beginning of the performance to decide who plays who. Tonight Lia Williams called heads and won, so the assembled cast bowed to her as Queen Elizabeth I, who's been ruling for eight years and has restored Protestantism to England - along with a stability the country hasn't known for a long time.

Theatre review: As You Like It (National Theatre)

With Rufus Norris, by his own admission, nowhere near as strong on the classics as his predecessor and relying heavily on advice from his associates, the choice of As You Like It as the first Shakespeare play of his tenure was greeted as something of a predictably safe choice. Happily this isn't something that extends to Polly Findlay's production which, though far from the funniest version of the play I've ever seen, may be one of the most charming and visually inventive. The setting is the court of a usurping duke - here a modern-day stock trading office - whose daughter Celia (Patsy Ferran) has been allowed to keep her cousin Rosalind (Rosalie Craig) as a companion. But Duke Frederick's (Leo Wringer) moods are unpredictable, and he decides to banish Rosalind. She and Celia escape to the forest, taking with them the clown Touchstone (Mark Benton.)

Theatre review: Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

Things would probably be better all round for everyone (especially me) if I could have made this a non-review, but while I was tempted, I didn't leave Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at the interval like so many people. It was probably more the fact that this is the inaugural production from the NT's new team in charge that brought me back, rather than any real faith that the second act might be better (it wasn't.) Caryl Churchill's 1976 play is a look at the English Civil War, specifically one side of it - the Levellers and the peasants who backed them up, ending up with the deposition and execution of Charles I, and the installation of Oliver Cromwell (Daniel Flynn.) Though all fighting on one side, their motivations, religious beliefs and what they ultimately expect from their rebellion vary wildly and, using in part edited transcripts of real debates, Churchill shows us, in great detail, the major and minor points on which they differed, and what they actually got in the end.

Theatre review: Unusual Unions

Yet another collection of short plays to include a contribution from the ubiquitous Tom Wells, this is a one-day event playing a total of two performances only, and commissioned by the Royal Court as one of a number of companion pieces to their main-house show The Mistress Contract. Inspired by that piece's unorthodox relationship, five writers have been asked to come up with something on the theme of Unusual Unions, and each one of them has contributed, in my opinion, something far superior to the main event. The way this promenade show works is actually very similar to I Do: The audience is colour-coded into "teams," who are led round the building to various areas, so the order anyone saw the plays in is fairly arbitrary and varies from group to group. So, as part of the green team Phill, Andy and I started by being taken to an unused Downstairs dressing room, for Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Anhedonia, directed by Simon Godwin. We meet a girl (Rona Morison) wearing a hijab, although not for the reasons we might expect. A violent incident has left her in a very dark place and interestingly, in contrast to the dramatic cliche, her encounter with the friendly foreman (Nathan Osgood) of a building site she's walked into doesn't leave her in a good place exactly, but it does make her that one step closer to coping. The subtle use of changing pronouns is a clever way of showing how the story develops in Lenkiewicz's powerful little piece.

Theatre review: Talk Show

After last week's all-female show, an all-male cast rounds off the Royal Court's weekly rep season, although a couple of absent women do loom large in Alistair McDowall's Talk Show, which Caroline Steinbeis directs. Three generations of unemployed men share a small house in an unnamed town that's been badly hit by the recession. Bill (Ferdy Roberts) has moved into the living room to let his ageing father Ron (Alan Williams) have his bedroom, while the basement is occupied by Bill's 26-year-old son Sam (Ryan Sampson.) With little else to do, Sam hosts a YouTube talk show every night, interviewing locals for the benefit of eight viewers (on a good night.) After one of these shows has wrapped up, a filthy, half-naked man (Jonjo O'Neill) crawls in through the basement window: It's his uncle Jonah, who's been missing for five years, and now wants Sam to hide him there for a while.

Theatre review: Mint

Director Clare Lizzimore tries her hand at playwrighting (and immediately makes it into my good books by not attempting to pull double duty and direct it herself.) Instead Caroline Steinbeis directs Mint, this week's offering from the Royal Court's rep season. Mint is the name of the colour of paint in Alan's jail cell, and he chose it himself - one of the few times during his lengthy incarceration that he had any small measure of control. The exact nature of Alan's crime is revealed later on, but we know from the off that it's something pretty serious - he's behind bars for several years and he starts off in a maximum security prison, although good behaviour sees him moved elsewhere down the line. Sam Troughton may never have been more intense than as the man whose supposed rehabilitation we follow from the end of the last millennium into the start of this one.