Theatre review: High Noon

Billy Crudup has returned to the West End, which could be seen as a brave move but at least he's learned his lesson and is doing his own accent this time. And it's the most American of genres, the Western, as Eric Roth adapts the 1952 movie High Noon: Crudup plays Will Kane, the beloved sheriff of a small New Mexico town, who wants to get his oats and so has married a Quaker. Amy's (Denise Gough) beliefs mean she wouldn't agree to marry him unless he gave up his violent job, and the show opens with a double ceremony on a Sunday morning as the couple get married, followed by Will handing in his badge and gun. But no sooner has he done so than news arrives of unnamed politicians pardoning Frank Miller (understudy Noel White,) the outlaw and right-wing comic book writer who terrorised the town until Will brought him to justice five years earlier.

Theatre review: Dear Octopus

An obscure rediscovery seems to have been a hit at the Lyttelton as Emily Burns directs Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus, a sprawling family drama set over the weekend of Dora (Lindsay Duncan) and Charles Randolph's (Malcolm Sinclair) golden anniversary. The sort of family who describe themselves as ordinary because they don't have a coat of arms, they assemble at the large country house built by Charles' grandfather. Over the weekend we see four generations of the family who've been raised in this house - three of them by the same nanny. Of the couple's six children four survive - the eldest son died in the First World War, while one daughter died of undisclosed causes. The others juggle various successes and neuroses: Margery (Amy Morgan) is trying to control her warring children, Hilda (Jo Herbert) manages to balance a successful job as an estate agent with her OCD, and Cynthia (Bethan Cullinane) works for a Paris fashion house, although rumour has it she's been in France for so long because she's concealing a scandal in her personal life.

Stage-to-screen review: Hamlet (Bristol Old Vic / BBC)

It's been a couple of years since I last saw a full production of Hamlet, and with a while yet before the next major one is due (now watch as another gets announced the second after I click Publish,) it seemed as good a time as any to check out the version the BBC offered up recently as part of their First Folio season. This was John Haidar's 2022 production at the Bristol Old Vic, one that had caught my eye for casting real-life husband and wife Finbar Lynch and Niamh Cusack as the king and queen of Denmark. Haidar didn't cast Calam Lynch in the lead to complete the family set, but instead Billy Howle plays Hamlet, the prince of Denmark who's moping quietly at the start of the play after his father's sudden death. Alex Eales' set is slickly black and I want to call Natalie Pryce's costumes modern-dress, except the characters' tech is very Nineties: Hamlet loves soliloquising into his dictaphone, and "The Mousetrap" is interrupted when Polonius' pager goes off.

Theatre review: Europe

I first went to the Donald and Margot Warehouse during the Sam Mendes days, so I'm on to my fourth Artistic Director of the venue as Michael Longhurst starts his tenure by directing Europe, a 25-year-old David Greig play whose original inspiration was the breakup of Yugoslavia but whose nebulous, borderline-surreal setting makes it feel timeless. The town where the action takes place is never named, but it's somewhere in Europe, close to a national border but otherwise pretty remote and easy to ignore. Even easier, soon: Trains going to every corner of the continent pass through, but all of a sudden they don't stop at the local station. Station Master Fret (Ron Cook) can't figure out the new timetable he's been sent, not realising the fact he can't find when the trains are meant to arrive is an underhand way of telling him the station is closing.

Theatre review: Life of Galileo

Lizzie Clachan has turned the Young Vic into a planetarium for Joe Wright's production of Brecht's Life of Galileo, one of the most visually stunning and inventive shows on the London stage right now. The set is in the round, with a central pit where some of the audience sit on cushions, with the actors mingling around them. It gives the impression of a group of students in a relaxed setting, sitting around a charismatic teacher who's on a roll. The teacher is Galileo Galilei (Brendan Cowell,) the subject he's excited about the Copernican Heresy, which proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and which astronomer Giordano Bruno had recently been burned at the stake for promoting. But Galileo teaches in Padua, which has a special exemption from the Inquisition's clutches and besides, having stolen credit for the invention of the telescope, he now has a tool that he can actually use to look at the stars and prove Copernicus right.