Theatre review: The Estate

As a result of having to close the Dorfman for the best part of a year for maintenance works, the final season of RuNo shows at the National Theatre's smallest space is launching just as the ones in the two larger venues are coming to a close. The opener for this three-play season comes from a first-time playwright, Shaan Sahota, and mixes lively political comedy with a much bleaker look at generational trauma in a patriarchal society. Angad Singh (Adeel Akhtar) is a minor member of the Shadow Cabinet, but when the leader of his party has to resign because of a scandal, he becomes a surprise favourite to replace him. This big upheaval in his career coincides with one in his personal life, as his father dies unexpectedly, leaving him his entire property portfolio. Though his sisters Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Malicka (Shelley Conn) are used to being overlooked, not even being mentioned in the will still comes as a slap in the face.

Theatre review: This Is My Family

First seen in Sheffield in 2013, Tim Firth's (book and music) This Is My Family has taken twelve years to make it to London, and after seeing Vicky Featherstone's production at Southwark Playhouse I have to wonder: Why the rush? Nicky (Nancy Allsop) is a 13-year-old girl who's entered a competition to explain why her family is perfect, and has told the truth, but left out a few salient details: Parents Steve (Michael Jibson) and Yvonne (Gemma Whelan) have been together since they were 16, but they're drifting apart and Steve is considering taking a job in Abu Dhabi. Older brother Matt (Luke Lambert) used to be very close to her but now he's having a teenage druid phase and obsessing over his girlfriend. And grandmother May (Gay Soper) has the mischievous side she describes, but she's now also got fast-encroaching dementia.

Theatre review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Rebecca Frecknall returns to the major Tennessee Williams plays at the Almeida and, with The Glass Menagerie having been done to death in recent years, the next obvious candidate would be Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which hasn't had a major London production since the genitals-forward one of 2017. Still, that one having such a distinctive, er, visual identity means Frecknall still has to put a strong stamp on her version to make it stand out, and unsurprisingly she does. A wealthy, plantation-owning Southern family get together to celebrate the 65th birthday of Big Daddy (Lennie James,) who's recently got the all-clear from cancer. Except he hasn't: In a play about secrets, the one most of the family share is that the doctor's letter actually revealed his condition was inoperable, terminal, and about to enter its final stages. But in what is being considered a kindness, he and Big Mama (Clare Burt) are being kept in the dark.

Theatre review: Next to Normal

Fifteen years after its Broadway debut Next to Normal gets its London premiere at the Donald and Margot Warehouse, and in many ways you can see why UK producers might have been wary of bringing it here for so long - and not just because it won the Pulitzer for drama, and should therefore automatically be treated with suspicion. It treads a fine line between the emotionally raw and the emotionally manipulative, and I'm still not sure which dominates overall; there's definitely moments that fall on one or other side of that line. Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey’s (book and lyrics) musical is certainly a bold take on mental health issues, as it introduces Diana (Caissie Levy,) her husband Dan (Jamie Parker,) and teenage children Gabe (Jack Wolfe) and Natalie (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) as an almost exaggeratedly average family.

Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet (Almeida)

Now pretty firmly established as the Almeida's current big-draw director, Rebecca Frecknall tackles her first Shakespeare at the venue, and goes for one regular readers will both know I rarely get on with. In Romeo & Juliet a gang war between two families has been a blight on Verona for who knows how many years if not centuries. Romeo (Toheeb Jimoh) and Juliet (Isis Hainsworth) are teenagers from opposite sides of the conflict, but when Romeo sneaks into a party at his enemies' home, he and Juliet fall in love at first sight. Aware that their families' feud will forbid any relationship between them, they go for an extreme solution and marry in secret. But the violence affects them directly soon enough, Romeo gets exiled for murdering Juliet's cousin, and their convoluted plots to continue fooling their families end in tragedy.

Theatre review: Phaedra

Australian writer-director Simon Stone's calling card appears to be classical adaptations that keep the original title but very little else; at least his take on Phaedra, after a couple of hours that are unrecognisable even as radical adaptation of the original myth, end up in a place that deals with the same kind of actions and consequences. The play is credited as being "after Euripides, Seneca and Racine." I haven't seen the Seneca version because nobody stages Seneca, but there's certainly no initial link to the story told in the other two. Helen (Janet McTeer) is a high-profile opposition MP, her husband Hugo (Paul Chahidi) a diplomat who grew up in Britain after his parents fled the Iranian Revolution. As a family they don't seem too big on boundaries, and if Helen is going to develop a fixation on a younger man, the initial candidate seems to be her son-in-law Eric (John Macmillan,) with whom she has an awkwardly flirtatious relationship.

Theatre review: Othello (National Theatre / Lyttelton)

Othello must be one of the most-frequently performed Shakespeare plays at the National Theatre, and the latest production by Deputy Artistic Director Clint Dyer - the first at the venue by a black director - is in part inspired by how long the version with Laurence Olivier in blackface continued to hold pride of place in the archive. That's one of the photos that adorn the back wall of the stage as the audience enters the Lyttelton, among an ever-changing projection display of past production posters that suggests the different approaches to the play taken over the years. As the display ticks past the years since it was written, we get the idea that we've reached a very 2022 reading, which strips the play back to show its racial conflicts as the primary motivator. Here, only Giles Terrera's General Othello isn't white; almost everyone in the rest of the cast doubles as a member of a sinister, black-shirted chorus Dyer has christened the System.

Theatre review: Is God Is

The Royal Court is currently offering up two shows a night on its main stage, and if What If If Only is concerned with wishing someone would return from the dead, Is God Is opens with just that happening: Twins Racine (Tamara Lawrance) and Anaia (Adelayo Adedayo) thought their mother had died in the same fire that left them both scarred, until they get a letter from her. Even more horrifically burnt, she's been clinging on to life in a convalescent home for 18 years, but now she thinks her time is finally up, and she wants to see her daughters. From her deathbed, their mother (Cecilia Noble) gives them the full story of how their father tried to burn her to death because she "wouldn't hold him," and asks for one favour before she goes: They need to find him, kill him (ideally breaking his spirit first,) and bring her back a bloody trophy to prove that he's gone. The hot-headed Racine and more reserved, thoughtful Anaia head off to California, letting no-one stand in their way.

Theatre review: The Duchess of Malfi

Rebecca Frecknall has inherited Robert Icke's Associate Director position at the Almeida and with it, it would seem, the van Hove-style captions and a set dominated by a glass-panelled room. Why this one, designed by Chloe Lamford, appears to be a gym changing room I'm not sure, but if the visuals are a bit more elaborate than in her last couple of shows here, Frecknall's style continues to pare scenes down to a breathtaking minimum. The Duchess of Malfi is John Webster's tale of a woman afflicted with two sexy-but-evil brothers, and Lydia Wilson gives a steely performance as the Duchess who's widowed very young, and claims she has no intention of marrying again. It's a lie she tells because she's in love with her steward Antonio (Khalid Abdalla,) and the gulf between their stations means her older brother the Cardinal (Michael Marcus) would rather see her dead than marrying beneath her and disgracing the family.

Theatre review: The Antipodes

In what is becoming a regular occurrence Annie Baker's latest play gets its UK premiere in the Dorfman, where for The Antipodes her particular brand of hyperrealism tips that little bit further into surrealism. Baker herself co-directs with designer Chloe Lamford, whose deep thrust stage is a luxurious but personality-free conference room in which the characters will spend weeks or maybe months of their lives around the table - there's enough Perrier stacked up against the wall to get them though a siege. There is a real-life situation the scene evokes: The writers' room of an American TV show where stories are pitched and constructed. But exactly what kind of story Sandy (Conleth Hill) has gathered a team - some of whom have worked with him before, some of whom are new - to tell remains vague.

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: The American Clock

London's improptu Arthur Miller festival continues with my second of his more obscure works in a week. The Old Vic will be featuring one of the more famous plays in a couple of months when All My Sons opens, but first The American Clock, which has another close link to The Price in that it's once again a story of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the resulting Depression. Except this is a much more on-the-nose approach, a sweeping review of the way people were affected throughout America, although it does have a single Jewish family at its heart, played in Rachel Chavkin's production by three sets of actors: We follow Moe Baum, initially played by James Garnon, his wife Rose (Clare Burt) and teenaged son Lee (Fred Haig - you know when you suddenly realise something like "oh he must be David Haig's son seeing as how they have the same last name and THE EXACT SAME FACE" and then feel stupid for not noticing it the first second you saw him? That.)

Theatre review: Superhoe

It’s about time someone wrote a play about a really terrific gardening implement, but writer-performer Nicôle Lecky’s monologue Superhoe is about the other kind of hoe. She plays 24-year-old Sasha, living at home with her mother, half-sister and stepfather in East London and harbouring dreams of being a singer-songwriter and rapper. She’s written a lot of songs and spent an inheritance from her grandmother on recording them, but apart from regularly announcing on Instagram that her EP is about to drop she doesn’t actually seem to be trying to promote her music. Instead she spends her days passed out in her bedroom and her nights out with her long-term boyfriend or getting stoned. But when the boyfriend suddenly ghosts her – for reasons that are never revealed but can probably be inferred – she sets fire to his front garden.

Theatre review: The Cane

It's Christmas at the Royal Court, which is like Christmas anywhere else except the word "cunt" features a lot more prominently than in most seasonal fare. Also there's nothing remotely Christmassy about it, as Mark Ravenhill creates what could be a twisted flipside to The Browning Version. Here too a teacher is about to retire, but unlike Rattigan's protagonist Edward (Alun Armstrong,) who's taught at the same school for 45 years, many of them as Deputy Head, has been generally well-liked by the students and staff, at least as far as he's aware. But with a week to go until his retirement, Edward's estranged daughter Anna (Nicola Walker) returns to her parents' home, to try and forge some kind of relationship between her children and their grandparents; only to find it under siege by hundreds of angry children.

Theatre review: Pity

After the comparative triumph of writing the Olivier’s least-worst new play of 2017, Rory Mullarkey returns to the Royal Court where his somewhat disjointed style of playwriting goes up a notch to fully embrace Absurdism. Pity opens on a generic town square – it used to be the Market Square but there isn’t a market any more – where an ice cream stall has been set up, and Francesca Mills runs a tombola before the show starts. A man named only as Person (Abraham Popoola) starts to narrate his day – unemployed, he people-watches as it’s the only way to spend his time that doesn’t cost anything – and meets a Professor (Paul Bentall) who’s in the middle of a reactionary rant to his daughter when he’s struck by lightning and killed instantly. Person responds by proposing to Daughter (Sophia Di Martino) and the two marry without getting round to learning each other’s names.

Theatre review: Jubilee

I have to admit, Chris Goode's Jubilee didn't appeal to me when the Lyric Hammersmith first added it to their programming, and I only changed my mind about booking it when I found out the cast included Lucy Ellinson - she's someone whose performances I try not to miss. So I approached the show cautiously, but hoping to be pleasantly surprised. But while there's some good moments, this attempt to transplant the spirit of punk into the 21st century falls curiously flat. Derek Jarman's iconic 1978 film, set the year before during the Queen's Silver Jubilee, gets relocated to 2018 and framed - for reasons I'm still not entirely clear on - by a different Queen Elizabeth: Toyah Willcox, from the original film's cast, appears as Elizabeth I, who makes a Faustian request for divine knowledge, and is granted a vision of a group of genderqueer squatters four centuries into her future.

Theatre review: John

Annie Baker's playwrighting style can be at times understated to the point of eccentricity, but 2016's production of The Flick obviously found an audience at the National as her latest, John - even the title now understated and cryptic - also comes to the Dorfman, and to me at least feels like something a bit more special even than the lauded last play. Elias (Tom Mothersdale) was an American Civil War geek as a child, so when a road trip home after Thanksgiving takes them near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he persuades his girlfriend Jenny (Anneika Rose) that they should stop off there for a couple of days so he can visit the historic battlefields. Already much less enthusiastic about trekking through freezing cornfields than her boyfriend is, when Jenny gets a particularly painful period she ends up letting him go out alone, staying behind at the bed and breakfast with its colourful owner.

Theatre review: Gundog

Simon Longman’s pastoral nightmare Gundog is the final Upstairs show in the current Royal Court season (surely a new announcement is overdue?) and once again sees Vicky Featherstone channel something of the spirit of Edward Bond in this space: After the dead baby play we now get something that, though in some ways effective, in others comes perilously close to misery porn. Becky (Ria Zmitrowicz) and Anna (Rochenda Sandall) are sisters living on desolate land in the middle of nowhere. They come from a family of sheep-farmers, but after the deaths of their parents, and an infection that took out most of their flock, they have nothing left. Not knowing any other way of life they now steal a few pregnant ewes from other flocks they hope nobody will miss, and just about subsist on the money they get from slaughtering and selling the lambs.

Theatre review: My Mum's a Twat

First-time playwrights often prove naturals at certain aspects of the job, while others need to be developed over time. One thing Anoushka Warden has clearly got an instinct for is coming up with a title that’ll get people in to see your play in the first place, as evidenced by her debut My Mum’s a Twat. It’s an autobiographical monologue (it’s described as “an unreliable version of a true story filtered through a hazy memory and vivid imagination”) performed by Future Dame Patsy Ferran on a Chloe Lamford set that at first glance looks like a teenage girl’s bedroom (the audience seating includes beanbags as well as more traditional chairs.) In fact it’s more like a scrapbook come to life, the different sections of the walls decorated with pictures of her favourite things – Tupac, David Jason, her dog – and the shelves full of music and films that remind her of her extended family of siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings.

Theatre review: Grimly Handsome

In a week at the theatre that’s fast developing a theme of dreamlike oddity – and I haven’t even seen The Twilight Zone yet - Julia Jarcho’s Grimly Handsome plays out like a Christmas comedy nightmare. The Royal Court’s old rehearsal space above Sloane Square station has been used as an actual performance venue so often by now that they’ve given it a name – The Site – and that’s where designer Chloe Lamford and director Sam Pritchard – credited as co-creators – have set their particular vision for the play. This sees the whole building decked out as an art installation, with the audience invited to turn up twenty minutes early and explore the various rooms Lamford has decorated with a kitsch aesthetic: A gym with walls covered in magazine cuttings of bodybuilders, a room filled with artsy photos on the theme of infidelity and, on the balcony, a crime scene tent.