Theatre review: The Knight of the Burning Pestle

In Francis Beaumont’s The London Merchant, Jasper (Kirill Chernyshenko) is in love with his master’s daughter Luce (Anna Vardevanian,) but their plans to elope are thwarted at every turn by both her parents and his. Except the biggest obstacle to their being together isn’t actually a part of their own story, because The London Merchant doesn’t exist, except as the play-within-a-play that gets disrupted in Beaumont’s proto-postmodernist The Knight of the Burning Pestle. When I saw the Swanamaker production a few years ago I loved its inspired, multi-layered silliness and the feeling that the play was centuries ahead of its time so much I went back for seconds, which made the prospect of director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod, a team who deliver eccentric and chaotic results at the best of times, tackling it something to look forward to.

Theatre review: Measure for Measure (Cheek by Jowl)

It's a couple of years since Cheek by Jowl brought a new production to London, and four since their Russian company - whose Tempest made my Top 10 shows of 2011 and remains memorable - were here. This time they're showing the first of this year's competing Measure for Measures, and it's one that the upcoming productions will surely find it hard to beat. Vienna is governed by strict morality laws, but having allowed them to lapse during two decades in charge, the Duke (Alexander Arsentyev) doesn't think he can enforce them himself, so pretends to leave the city, actually disguising himself as a friar. He leaves the running of the city to Angelo (Andrei Kuzichev,) who does indeed crack down immediately on vice. But in his very first high-profile case Angelo's moral highground is compromised.