Theatre review: Everyman

If the first show programmed by the new Artistic Director was anything to go by, we would have been in for a dull time at the National Theatre over the next few years, but we've got something more interesting - if eccentrically so - in the first play Rufus Norris has taken on to direct himself. It may be a new era but Norris goes right back to the beginning of extant English theatre with the mediaeval morality play Everyman, "Ev" to his friends in this new version by Carol Ann Duffy. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Ev, whom we first meet tumbling through the air to the stage in slow motion, in what could be a symbolic Fall of Man but turns out to be somewhat more prosaic: An accident after a coke-fuelled 40th birthday party. Death (Dermot Crowley) arrives to tell him his time is up, and soon Ev will need to make a reckoning with God (Kate Duchêne,) and justify the way he's lived his life.

Theatre review: A Season in the Congo

The film director and Keira Knightley-enabler Joe Wright only made his theatrical debut a few months ago, but he's already looking very assured in his follow-up, A Season in the Congo. Aimé Césaire's play was written in 1966, only a few years after the events it describes, as it follows the story of Congolese independence through the eyes of its first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. A former beer salesman who'd sneak rhetoric against the Belgian colonists into his sales pitch, a few years later he would win the country's first democratic election. But his idealism overlooks both the Belgians' sneaky plan to hold onto financial interests in their former colony, and the tribal enmities it will exploit to do so. Within a few months he has catastrophically lost control, and inadvertently paved the way for a far from democratic Congo.