Stage-to-screen review: Constellations(Anna Maxwell Martin/Chris O'Dowd cast)

I doubt regular readers of this blog (either of them) will be particularly shocked to see me make one last return to the 2021 West End casts of Constellations in the final week of their availability online: Having watched three out of four casts it would have felt like unfinished business not to complete the set. And it's no slight on Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O'Dowd that they were last on my list, but with the first and second London casts of Nick Payne's play having been straight white couples in their thirties, a straight white couple in their early forties weren't as much of a stretch when Michael Longhurst's consciously diverse season also offered a black couple in their twenties, an interracial gay couple and a pair in their sixties and seventies. But Payne's love story with infinite possibilities across the multiverse has also proved to take on almost as many possibilities with different casts, so another one always seems to be worth the time.

Theatre review: Consent

It feels like a while since we had a new Nina Raine play so Consent is a welcome arrival at the National, and the playwright's sharp dialogue finds a natural home in a group of friends most of whom are barristers. Kitty (Anna Maxwell Martin) and Edward (Ben Chaplin) have been married for ten years and have only just had their first child; Rachel (Priyanga Burford) and Jake (Adam James) have two children but their marriage has hit a rocky patch as Rachel suspects Jake of having an affair. The sextet is rounded off when Ed sets up his colleague Tim (Pip Carter) with Kitty's actor friend Zara (Daisy Haggard,) but this has the side effect of the two men's antagonistic relationship in court spilling out into their personal lives as Tim accuses Ed of actually wanting Zara for himself.

Theatre review: Macbeth (Young Vic)

When Carrie Cracknell directed Medea at the National, Lucy Guerin's choreography was singled out as a major part of the production's atmosphere. Now, for Macbeth at the Young Vic, Cracknell and Guerin share equal directing credit as they attempt to fully integrate dance with Shakespeare's text. Macbeth (John Heffernan) is the star general in Duncan's (Nicholas Burns) Scottish army, but an encounter with three witches feeds his ambitions and makes him impatient to take the throne himself. He and his wife (Anna Maxwell Martin) goad each other into a plot to kill Duncan in his sleep and take his kingdom. They succeed, but as with so many Shakespearean kings he finds power hard to wield. Soon he's arranging more murders to cover up the way he came to the throne, and to quash any new threats.

Theatre review: King Lear (National Theatre)

The first King Lear I ever saw, 20 years ago, starred Robert Stephens in the title role, and Edgar was played by the then rising star of the RSC, Simon Russell Beale. It maybe says a bit too much about my age that the wheel, which is so often referenced in the play, has come full circle and it's now SRB's turn - admittedly at the comparatively young age of 53 - to play the king who abdicates in all but name. He reunites with his long-time collaborator Sam Mendes on the National's main stage, and although it's a long-awaited event I couldn't help but feel a little bit apprehensive given I didn't love any of Mendes' Bridge Project productions. King Lear, though, sees the director get his Shakespearean mojo back for a truly epic - there's no major text cuts so we're in it for the full three-and-a-half hours - and emotionally devastating production.

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - Look Back in Anger

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is surely the best-known of the four "Playwright's Playwrights" readings being presented by the Royal Court at the Duke of York's. It's so iconic that despite hot having seen it on stage before, the first act especially was very familiar to me, and I know I'm not the only person who found that to be the case. (In fact this familiarity did mean this week's reading lacked one of the joys of last week's, of the cast discovering the play as the audience do.) But the reason the theatre was, in stark contrast to last week's sparse but enthusiastic crowd, packed to the rafters today wasn't entirely to do with the play: It had been announced that Benedict Cumberbatch would play the archetypal Angry Young Man, Jimmy Porter, and St Martin's Lane was packed with fans long before kick-off. Jimmy lives in a small apartment with wife Alison (Rebecca Hall) and their friend Cliff (handsome Welshman Matt Ryan.) These two help each other bear the brunt of Jimmy's constant furious outbursts, taking out his frustrations about life in general on the pair of them. The combination of Alison becoming pregnant, and the arrival of her old friend Helena (Anna Maxwell Martin) coming to visit, effects a change in the status quo.