Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing (RSC / RST)

Theatrical 2025 looks set to be memorable in part for Shakespeare productions whose high concepts tip over from the eccentric to the downright daft, and following Hamlet on the Titanic onto the RSC's main stage is Much Ado About Nothing, with Michael Longhurst's debut for the company moving the play from the world of soldiers and orange groves to that of professional footballers and WAGs. FC Messina have just won a European championship and the celebrations will be held at the home of the team sponsor, Leonato (understudy Nick Cavaliere,) a media mogul whose sports channels show all their games, with his niece Beatrice (Freema Agyeman) as one of the post-match interviewers. This is how she knows one of the players, Benedick (Nick Blood,) and the two have a brief sexual history that makes their encounters spiky to this day.

Theatre review: Statues

Azan Ahmed's Statues, which he also performs in, starts with his character Yusuf entering the flat he grew up in, that he hasn't spent much time in as an adult: His mother moved to Pakistan after his parents divorced, and his father Mustafa, who lived there alone, was an emotionally distant man whom his son remembers as barely even speaking. But as he clears out the flat after his father's death, Yusuf discovers some tapes left behind. After the necessary comedy sequence about anyone younger than Gen X not being able to operate a cassette player, he discovers that when he was younger Mustafa had been a rapper, with witty lyrics covering both his love life and experiences as a British Muslim, and some very catchy tunes (composed by Holly Khan.)

Theatre review: After Sex

Siofra Dromgoole's After Sex follows a casual couple navigating whether and how to make their relationship something more concrete, entirely through the conversations they have after sex - it's not a conceit the playwright sticks to entirely religiously, but it does offer a slightly new way of looking at a frequently-covered subject. We meet Her (Antonia Salib) and Him (Azan Ahmed) just after the first time they had sex (and a little bit during the second,) having met at work and decided to try something no-strings-attached. It's a short play, but it would be even shorter if they didn't find that strings were attaching themselves pretty quickly whether they like it or not, and pretty soon they're both betraying the fact that part of them is already imagining a longer-term future together; usually when they're most enthusiastically trying to protest to the contrary.

Theatre review: The Tempest (Shakespeare's Globe / Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank)

Hey, you know what's a great way to stop me from spending an entire review of The Tempest ranting about how awful Prospero is? Edit the text so you cut out... more or less everything he does. Yes, for a second year the Globe has added a public performance schedule to the Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production - essentially a scaled-down version of a play on the curriculum, designed for school parties. Pleasingly, Diane Page's production follows the others I've seen both live and online, in that apart from cutting the script down to a little over 90 minutes, and some particularly shiny and gaudy designs from Moi Tran, this doesn't feel like a "kids'" version and doesn't patronise the audience for a second. The short running time also meant I could stand through it without hospitalising myself, and get to be in the thick of it as groundlings with my goddaughter Evie.