Theatre review: Top Girls

Which five people, living or dead, real or fictional, would you invite to your dream dinner party? To most people that’s a creaky old conversation-starter, but to Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) it’s the perfect way to celebrate a promotion, in the famous opening act of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. It’s 1981, Marlene’s become the first female Managing Director of Top Girls Employment Agency, and she’s gone to a trendy restaurant with five women from history and legend who embody a female ideal - or at least someone’s idea of it. Victorian adventurer Isabella Bird (Siobhan Redmond) and 13th century Japanese concubine, Buddhist nun and author Lady Nijō (Wendy Kweh) made their own way in a man’s world while others, like Pope Joan (Amanda Lawrence) and Brueghel’s soldier-woman Dull Gret (Ashley McGuire) took on masculine roles, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Theatre review: Shopping and Fucking

A few years ago Sean Holmes seemed to be initiating a tradition of reviving a famously dark and controversial play at the Lyric every autumn. We had Sarah Kane and Edward Bond's respective bouts of cruelty to babies, and now after a few years the nasty stuff returns for the 20th anniversary of another noted shocker - and one that did very well out of its reputation, getting a couple of West End runs out of it in the '90s - Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking. Young couple Robbie (Alex Arnold) and Lulu (Sophie Wu) live with the older Mark (Sam Spruell,) as his property - he bought them for £20 from a man he met in a supermarket. All three seem pretty happy with the arrangement until Mark has to leave for a few months to go to an addiction treatment clinic. Robbie and Lulu aren't used to fending for themselves, and in their search for work Lulu auditions for a TV shopping channel.

Theatre review: The Suicide

2016 definitely likes its comedy dark, and after the serious version as the Almeida used the moving (literally) Boy to look into a young man feeling disenfranchised in modern Britain, the National takes the same subject and plays it for big laughs. Suhayla El-Bushra's The Suicide is an adaptation of a controversial Stalin-era Russian satire by Nikolai Erdman, and sees Javone Prince's affable everyman Sam Desai frustrated after five years without a job, his wife Maya (Rebecca Scroggs) having to support them both, and the two living in her mother Sarah's (Ashley McGuire) flat. When he tries to help a friend he ends up late for the Job Centre, meaning he has his benefits sanctioned and, feeling completely useless, goes to the top of his tower block in the middle of the night, toying with the idea of jumping off.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Whenever I review a Shakespeare play, I make a note in the subject line of the company or venue, as there's so many productions of his plays I think it's best to be clear which one I'm talking about. I almost feel like I should do the same for Our Country's Good, because despite only first seeing it in 2012, this is now my third production. Timberlake Wertenbaker's play is an undisputed modern classic (though not one of the 101 best play ever according to Michael Billington but it's fine - he asked an imaginary woman what she thought and she agreed with him.) Based on true events, it follows one of the first shipments of convicts to be transported to Australia in 1788, to the area that would become Sydney. For the duration of their sentences they will remain prisoners, watched over by the army, but when their time is done they'll be sent out to colonise the new land.

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: Henry IV (Donmar Warehouse)

Following 2012's Julius Caesar, which saw the inmates of a women's prison perform the play but find some of its themes too close to home, for the Donmar's 2014 Shakespeare production they've returned to Phyllida Lloyd's concept to see the prisoners try again. Lloyd has now said she enviasages these all-female Shakeaspeares as a trilogy; the third play hasn't been revealed yet but the middle installment is a merging of the Henry IV plays. Although in practice it's a shortened version of Part 1, with Part 2 represented by its two most iconic scenes, plus a third that mops up some plot points. So this is largely the story of Prince Hal (Clare Dunne,) his life of petty crime and carousing with drunken knight Falstaff (Ashley McGuire,) and the first major indication that he's more of a formidable figure than he chooses to present: An uprising against his father, led by the charismatic Hotspur (Jade Anouka,) is crushed partly due to Hal's unexpected transformation into a fighting machine.