Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet(Empire Street Productions / Harold Pinter Theatre)

What if, instead of giving a written instruction to a servant who can't read, you gave it to one who can? If Capulet (Clark Gregg) had handed the invitations to his ball to the Nurse (Clare Perkins,) she could have found the guests herself. Instead the illiterate Peter (Jamie Ankrah) needs help from a stranger in the street, who invites himself along to the party to stalk a girl he fancies. Once there Romeo (Noah Jupe) falls for Capulet's daughter Juliet (Sadie Sink,) who enthusiastically returns his interest. This teenage infatuation is given an entirely unnecessary sense of peril and urgency by the fact that the pair's families have an unexplained, deadly rivalry, leading them into an elopement within hours of their first meeting. A number of other avoidable accidents and violent acts interfere over the next couple of days, and trying to navigate them while keeping their big secret sees the affair end in tragedy.

Theatre review: Bacchae

Long before he even announced he was leaving the National Theatre I was arguing that RuNo should be succeeded by InRu, so when I actually got what I wanted I wasn't going to let a little thing like Covid keep me from seeing the results: A couple of weeks later than originally planned I'm at the Olivier for Indhu Rubasingham's debut as Artistic Director, and the current front of house exhibition is all about how Ancient Greek theatre has always been a major part of the venue's DNA, not just in the amount of adaptations staged over the years but in the very architecture of the largest auditorium. But Rubasingham has always been more of a specialist in new writing than classics, so if Euripides' Bacchae already seemed a gory start to a new regime, it was always going to come with a twist or two as well.

Theatre review: Player Kings

A few years ago in his one-man show, Ian McKellen answered a question about Falstaff by saying that he'd always wanted to play the character until he saw Roger Allam play him at the Globe. Like many people he considered the performance definitive, and decided there was no point him tackling the role because there was nothing he could add to it. I wonder if the fact that he spent much of last year performing with Allam has anything to do with him changing his mind and, after years of turning it down, accepting Robert Icke's offer to join Player Kings, Icke's compressed version of both of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays. Falstaff is, at least as far as he's presented at the start of the show, something of an East End gangster, comparatively affable as far as crime bosses go but still involved with planning and, despite his advanced years and increasing waistline, carrying out robberies that can easily turn violent.

Theatre review: The Wife of Willesden

Given an extra push by the announcement, a couple of years ago, that Brent would be the London Borough of Culture*, the Kiln Theatre continues to commission hyper-local shows that celebrate the diversity and big personalities of the area. Indhu Rubasingham's latest production sees novelist Zadie Smith turn playwright, and adapt "The Wife of Bath's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, into a raucous modern-day version - The Wife of Willesden. The venue's recent major refurbishment has given it a very flexible auditorium, and designer Robert Jones takes the opportunity to more or less strip out the Stalls seats, replacing them with pub tables and benches that reach right up to the edges of the stage. In keeping with the theme of staying close to home, the design is based on the Sir Colin Campbell pub, right across the road from the theatre.

Radio review: The Likes of Us

After another week of staring at screens all day a radio play sometimes feels like the order of the day, this time a dip into the recent archive of Radio 3's drama strand, courtesy of the great Roy Williams: The Likes of Us premiered in February last year but has remained available on BBC Sounds. As mentioned by the playwright himself in his introduction, it was inspired by the Grenfell Tower fire, an event that provides both a framing device and a couple of crucial plot points in the life story of a woman loosely based on Williams' own mother. We first meet Gloria (Doreene Blackstock) through the prism of her daughter Sharon (Clare Perkins,) a teacher who's been tasked with writing her mother's eulogy. Having always had a combative relationship with her mother she finds this difficult, but takes some inspiration when she discovers Gloria kept secret diaries. These describe, as she would have expected, her arrival from Jamaica as part of the Windrush Generation, the racism she experienced, and the deterioration of her relationship with her husband (Steve Toussaint,) in part as a result of those experiences, in part because of his many affairs.

Theatre review: Sweat

On past experience, a play having won the Pulitzer isn’t much of a guarantee that I’m going to like it, if anything the opposite; identifying a hot-button topic to write about often seems to be enough to win regardless of execution. Lynn Nottage is the first woman to have won the theatre prize twice, and the Donald and Margot Warehouse gets the UK premiere of the latest, Sweat. Nottage certainly identified her hot-button topic early: She started research in 2011, for a play which in part feels like an explanation for why parts of America were so vulnerable to the rise of Trump. The good news is that, in Lynette Linton’s production, the execution lives up to the idea. Nottage was inspired by the statistic that Reading, Pennsylvania, a relatively comfortable industrial city in the 20th century, was now the poorest place in America. The shift came when the textile mill that was the area’s primary employer significantly downsized and outsourced its work, leaving people who’d always felt comfortable in their job security suddenly unemployed.

Theatre review: Emilia

Like most new Artistic Directors, Michelle Terry's had a mixed first season in charge of the Globe, but one area that for me has seemed an unqualified success has been her approach to gender parity in casting. Although she's stuck to her predecessor's target of 50/50 casting, Terry has amended this to be across an entire season rather than on a production-by-production basis, so directors of individual shows don't feel too restricted by it. One way to make sure a lot of classics dominated by men can be balanced out is by having one production cast entirely with women, and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's specially-commissioned Emilia is no random choice to get this treatment: The story of a possible muse of Shakespeare's bubbles over with anger at the absence of women from Jacobethan theatre, so the way Nicole Charles's production flips the era's all-male casting doesn't feel like meeting a quota, but like an essential part of the play's reclaiming of women's voices.

Theatre review: The Convert

A couple of past successes will be coming back for Christopher Haydon's final season of programming at the Gate, and after the success of Eclipsed* he brings back writer Danai Gurira for an unusually long and epic play by the venue's usual standards: The Convert is set in late Victorian Rhodesia, where both Catholic and Protestant churches have made slight inroads in converting the locals. Taken from his family as a child, Chilford (Stefan Adegbola) is a devout Catholic, helping the local priest and frustrated by the fact that an old rival has been accepted to the priesthood, as he himself had hoped to be the first black African priest. He's never managed to get anyone quite as enthusiastic about the white men's religion as he is - his housekeeper Mai Tamba (Clare Perkins) goes through the motions but also performs good luck magic when he's not looking. But her niece Jekesai (Mimi Ndiweni) is a different story.

Theatre review: The House That Will Not Stand

Carrying distinct echoes of The House of Bernarda Alba, Marcus Gardley's tragicomedy The House That Will Not Stand is, thankfully, possessed of a much lighter touch despite taking on issues every bit as troubling as Lorca. The setting is New Orleans in 1836, a place and time in American history when black rights - for a select few - were a reality, but one that was already being threatened by new laws. Most of the characters are "free colored women," but as Gardley's play explores, freedom may be illusory, just as there's more than one form of slavery. As the play starts, a wealthy white Louisiana man, Lazare (Paul Shelley,) has just died. Although he had a wife, he actually lived with his black mistress Beartrice (Martina Laird) and their daughters. As things stand, Beartrice is due to inherit the house, but she needs to do so quickly before the law changes. Meanwhile her daughters want to be allowed out of mourning to go to a ball and capture white men of their own before it's too late.