Theatre review: Death Note

It's been a much-loved manga and a much-loathed film, now Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note becomes a dynamic, tragicomic stage show. Frank Wildhorn (music,) Ivan Menchell (book) and Jack Murphy's (lyrics) musical adaptation debuted in Japan in 2015 and has had a concert production in London before, but Stephen Whitson's production now gives the fully-staged treatment to the story of a very right-wing teenager who gets to live out his fantasies of being judge, jury and executioner: When Ryuk (Telly Leung,) a Shinigami - a chaotic death god - gets bored of handing out death sentences to random humans, he deliberately misplaces his magic book in the mortal world to see who will pick it up. The Death Note ends up in the hands of Light Yagami (Xander Pang,) a schoolboy with an alarmingly right-wing attitude towards social justice.

Theatre review: Edward II

The second winter mini-season at the Swanamaker takes the theme of kings who were deposed, opening with Christopher Marlowe’s take on the subject; later in the season we’ll have Shakespeare’s response to it, as well as a more modern take. But first Edward II, the 1592 play that Ian McKellen is praising on his current UK tour as the first English play with an openly gay protagonist. It’s something that productions in more prudish eras must have tried to downplay – I imagine the whole LOOK THEY JUST DON’T LIKE FLATTERERS, OK? thing would have been made a big deal of – but it must have been a stretch, because it’s hardly subtext. Nick Bagnall’s production certainly doesn’t leave much room for doubt as to why, as soon as Edward II (Tom Stuart) takes the throne, his lords and ministers immediately take so violently against him.

Theatre review: The Secret Theatre

Anders Lustgarten doesn’t seem an obvious fit for the Swanamaker, but in comparing present-day paranoia and manipulation by politicians to the intrigue of Elizabeth I’s court he’s found a subject that doesn’t just suit the time the venue recreates, but also feels at home in the shadows of the candlelit playhouse. The Secret Theatre is about the Queen’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (Aidan McArdle,) who responded to the numerous assassination plots against her by creating the first surveillance state. He lives surrounded by paper, collecting files on Catholic threats and potential traitors, planting spies everywhere he can - often to spy on each other – and seeding an atmosphere of suspicion that seeps into every corner of the country. His plan is that his secret service should be the world’s worst-kept secret: You don’t actually need to watch everyone if everyone thinks they’re being watched.

Theatre review: Snow in Midsummer

A few years ago the RSC got caught up in a controversy over not casting enough British East Asian actors in classic Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao - a controversy that now looks very minor compared to the recent Print Room shitshow - but they now seem to be trying to make amends with a new ongoing project of translations of classical Chinese theatre. Of course the RSC's tendency to announce instantly-forgotten projects is notorious - how's that plan to stage the Shakespeare canon in the RST in 5 6 8 years with no repeats going? - but if the opening production is any indication, we have to hope this one has legs. Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's Snow in Midsummer is a free adaptation of a 13th century classic, Guan Hanqing's The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth.

Theatre review: The Jew of Malta

Ever since I first read Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta a few years ago I've been keen to see it on stage; not necessarily because of its virtues as a piece of writing, but to see how a 21st century production would cope with the aggressive antisemitism and racism that is even more at the heart of this story than it is in The Merchant of Venice. I thought it might crop up on the fringe at some point but in the event it was one of the country's biggest companies that took on the challenge, with Justin Audibert getting a baptism of fire on his RSC directing debut. The solution he's come up with is an interesting one, particularly in light of the fact that Merchant's LOLantisemitism attitude is often dealt with by ramping up the play's dark side: The opposite happens here, Marlowe's bloodthirsty and vicious revenge tragedy revealed as a black comedy.

Theatre review: Volpone

In an RSC summer season that's focusing on often dark issues of prejudice and outcasts, it falls to Ben Jonson to provide the madcap comic relief, as Trevor Nunn returns to Stratford-upon-Avon to revive one of Jonson's classic con-men in Volpone. Henry Goodman plays the immensely rich Volpone who - as the stock tickers dominating Stephen Brimson Lewis' design suggest - made his fortune on the markets. But he's hungry for more riches and wants to have some fun acquiring them, so he turns other people's greed against them: Pretending to be on his death bed, he lets it be known that he has no heir, and soon there's a queue of people at his door bearing gifts, all in the hope of being named in his will. As his pile of gold gets ever-bigger, he also sets his eye on Celia (Rhiannon Handy,) wife of one of his victims, Corvino (Matthew Kelly.)

Theatre review: Love's Sacrifice

The more obscure of this summer's Swan shows have been chosen in part as a reflection of one of the main RST Shakespeares. John Ford's Love's Sacrifice, which is meant to mirror Othello, really is an obscurity: No definite record seems to exist of it ever having been revived after its 1632 premiere, until now. Matthew Needham returns to the RSC and, with no Roman Emperors available in this year's rep, has to make do with the brattish Duke of Pavy, newly ascended to power and just married to Bianca (inter-species space lesbian Catrin Stewart,) a commoner whose beauty alone he fell for. The closest thing to an Iago figure is D'Avolos (Jonathan McGuinness,) the Duke's vaguely disgruntled secretary, who plans to tell his master that Bianca is cheating on him with his best friend. Where Love's Sacrifice differs from Othello is that - thanks in part, admittedly, to D'Avolos' interference - Bianca and Fernando (Jamie Thomas King) really have fallen in love.

Theatre review: Shakespeare in Love

Déjà vu at the Noël Coward Theatre, where six months after The Full Monty another screen-to-stage adaptation opens. Whether it'll fare any better is yet to be seen, but for now crowds seem keen to get in to Shakespeare in Love. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's film script has been adapted for the stage by Lee Hall, but the story is still one that places the world's best-loved playwright in a plot straight out of his own comedies: Will Shakespeare (Tom Bateman) is having writer's block after a few early successes, until he meets a new muse in noblewoman Viola De Lesseps (Lucy Briggs-Owen,) who's already madly in love with his poetry before she's even met him. But he's married, and she's about to be married off too, so it seems unlikely they'll be able to find a happy ending together.

Theatre review: Wendy and Peter Pan

Peter Pan gets a feminist makeover from Ella Hickson in the latest RSC family show, but there's also a definite hint of Philip Pullman being thrown in with the J.M. Barrie in Wendy and Peter Pan. And before we even get to these new underlying themes there's a new look to the Darling family right from the start: As well as Wendy, John and Michael, there's a fourth child, Tom (Colin Ryan.) But even as he plays with his sister and brothers he has a nasty case of Period Drama Cough that soon sees Tom dead, and the Darling family plunged into melancholy. A year later, a flying boy enters the children's bedroom and invites them to Neverland. Hearing that that's where the Lost Boys live, Wendy agrees to join Peter Pan on his adventures, believing she'll be able to find their own lost boy there too.

Theatre review: The Lightning Child

Euripides' The Bacchae features an antagonist threatened by sexuality, particularly that of women, whose plan to defeat this perceived threat involves him dressing as a woman himself. Throw in that popular Greek tragedy mainstay, the hermaphrodite seer Teiresias (Bette Bourne,) and it's not hard to see why it might have something to say to transgender people to this day, and be ripe for adaptation. Hence The Lightning Child, the final new premiere of the season at Shakespeare's Globe, and the latest collaboration between Ché Walker (book and lyrics) and Arthur Darvill (music and lyrics.) A disco-infused musical adaptation of the gory classic, The Lightning Child opens with Neil Armstrong (Harry Hepple) being cautioned by his wife that his planned mission is hubristic. Armstrong, of course, goes anyway, and in a scene left out of the history books encounters the man in the Moon, aka the Ladyboy Herald (Jonathan Chambers.) An acolyte of Dionysus, the Herald tells the astronaut of another case of hubris that upset the god.