Theatre review: Playhouse Creatures

With Playhouse Creatures April De Angelis completes a loose trilogy of plays about some of the first women to achieve fame - or notoriety - in something like the modern sense. Whether the connection was intentional I don't know, although I'm guessing the fact that all three of the plays have been underwhelming to one extent or another wasn't part of the plan. In the 1660s Nell Gwynn (Zoe Brough) is still an orange-seller wishing she could join the ranks of the new female actors, only recently allowed onto the stage by Charles II. After being pipped to the only open spot for a new actress by Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr) she eventually tricks her way into a minor role, securing a more permanent spot after catching the eye of the men in the audience - and the King himself.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - The Seagull

Last year's big one-day, three-play marathon, The Wars of the Roses, followed Shakespeare's rarely-performed Henry VI plays with the much-loved and frequently revived Richard III. So too this year when it's Anton Chekhov's turn, and after the very obscure Platonov and fairly rare Ivanov, Young Chekhov at the National takes us up to his first big hit, and my personal favourite, The Seagull, in the same theatre where I first saw the play. Tom Pye's set for the whole trilogy has, as far as possible, avoided the usual stuffy drawing rooms and, taking it's cue from Chekhov's love of a disappearing natural world, been dominated by dead trees and shallow waters. This water has colonised even more of the stage for the finale, with all of the upstage area now a lake, through which characters sometimes wade to make a dramatic entrance.

Theatre review: The Wolf From the Door

Revolution comes in the form of a black comedy fantasy in the first show of the Royal Court's new season, Rory Mullarkey's The Wolf From the Door. 25-year-old Leo (Calvin Demba) is jobless and homeless, but claims to be able to survive without eating, drinking, sleeping or sweating. When he meets eccentric aristocrat Lady Catherine at a train station and she takes him home, he assumes she wants him for sex, but her plans for him are much grander, and odder. Catherine (Anna Chancellor) is a leading light in an underground network of rebels and terrorists who've been meeting for months in innocuous-seeming groups to plot the overthrow of society. Discovering Leo, with his lack of apparent ties to that society, is the final piece of the puzzle, a figurehead for the revolution who will lead the country when the dust settles.

Theatre review: Private Lives

It's really not that long since Noël Coward's Private Lives was last in the West End - just three years in fact since Kim Cattrall headlined a production. So Chichester Festival Theatre must have felt pretty confident in Jonathan Kent's production to risk a new transfer - indeed had it not been for the £10 Time Out ticket offer, which got us perfectly good seats in the back of the Stalls, I'm not sure I would have bothered with this. But it's worth the tenner and a couple of hours of my time as it turns out to be quite a different beast to the last time I saw the play. Elyot (Toby Stephens) and Amanda (Anna Chancellor) were married for two years, divorced for five, and have both now married new partners. On the same day, in fact, as their honeymoons bring them to adjoining balconies of a French hotel, where moments after reassuring their new spouses that their exes are ancient history, their accidental meeting reignites the spark. (Literally - it's Noël Coward so there's a lot of languid smoking.)

Theatre review: South Downs and The Browning Version

Last year's Chichester season continues to become this year's West End season, as for the 2011 Terence Rattigan centenary they commissioned David Hare to write a companion piece to perhaps Rattigan's best-loved work, The Browning Version. Both plays are set in public schools, which Tom Scutt's set translates into polished wooden floors that fade into a dusty distance: Echoing perhaps the obscurity the characters think the institutions will fall into, as South Downs is set in the 1960s, when there was a genuine belief that public schools might be abolished. Hare's play, directed by Jeremy Herrin, plays first in the double bill, and shows us life from the point of view of the students. In particular one student, John Blakemore (Alex Lawther,) who isn't particularly popular at his High Church of England school. When he defends his best friend in class, his status as an outsider is only confirmed but Blakemore's search for answers continues, however much it aggravates his classmates.