Theatre review: The Tell-Tale Heart

Celeste (Tamara Lawrance,) an actress-turned-writer, wins an award for her debut play but turns it down at the ceremony, in an attempt to make a political point that misfires and makes for a lot of bad publicity – even Judi Dench hates her. She tries to escape the attention by renting an attic room in Brighton to write her follow-up, but her writer’s block persists, and she ends up distracting herself by making friends with her landlady. Nora (Imogen Doel) has led a sheltered life, home-schooled and nervous about being seen in public without the half-mask that covers a facial deformity. Confident that she’s above discriminating against her friend because of her looks, Celeste convinces her to show her what she really looks like, but it turns out the enormous right eye hiding under the mask is too much for her to cope with. Disgusted and haunted by the eye, Celeste wants to get it out of her life in any way she can, even if that means murder.

Theatre review: Three Sisters (Southwark Playhouse)

Until the last couple of years there was a dearth of Chekhov productions that offered anything other than a naturalistic period setting. Yet even before directors started to get a bit more adventurous around him, there was one play I'd only ever seen in modern dress. It's rather depressing that the play people always seem to think remains most relevant is Three Sisters, a play so bleak even Chekhov didn't try to pass it off as a comedy. Anya Reiss is another writer to bring the sisters bang up to date, although she does have previous - and her Seagull was also directed by Russell Bolam, so their return to Southwark Playhouse is a bit of a dream team reunion. The names of the characters haven't been Anglicised, but in other respects Reiss has tested the story's contemporary relevance by giving it a whole new context: The story is now set among British ex-pats in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

Theatre review: Somersaults

Russell Bolam directed my top show of 2012, and he kicks off 2013 with an English premiere, Iain Finlay Mcleod's Somersaults. The main show at the Finborough, it shares with the venue's current alternate show a Scottish lead character with Scots Gaelic as his first language, but is a very different, and in many ways even odder, creature. When he first reconnects with old university friend Mark (Simon Harrison) via Facebook, James (David Carlyle) seems to have it all: Thanks to a canny discovery and good investments, he's got a lot of cash and free time, which he's used to fill the Hampstead flat he and wife Alison (Emily Bowker) share with lots of desirable stuff. But his finances aren't what he thought they were, and soon an unusually posh bailiff, Barrett (Richard Teverson) turns up and his belongings and home are gone, with Alison not far behind.