Theatre review: Anna

On the one hand, it's disappointing to have a show at the National where cheap tickets are very thin on the ground; on the other, I can't complain if this is part of a new policy not to sell Dorfman side seats if they offer no view of the stage whatsoever. The reason you need to watch Anna head-on or not at all is that Vicki Mortimer's set is entirely behind a letterbox of sound-proof glass. This is because Ella Hickson's play is co-created with star sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, and making sure the audience hears, through headphones, only exactly what the creatives want them to hear is at the heart of the show. This is another show built on binaural sound, and the technology has obviously now progressed to the point that it can be made portable. And so everything we hear comes from the perspective of Phoebe Fox's titular character as she walks around her East Berlin flat.

Theatre review: Electra

The current in-the-round configuration at the Old Vic is a suitably exposed setting for a good, but stark production of Sophocles' Electra. Perennially one of the most popular Greek Tragedies, it takes place near the end of the saga of the House of Atreus, so by the time we join the story it comes with a lot of baggage, well into a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. Before the Trojan War, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to secure the Greek army's fortunes. Never forgiving him for it, his wife Clytemnestra (Diana Quick) waited for his return then murdered him, with help from her lover Aegisthus (Tyrone Huggins.) Now they rule together, to the continuing dismay of her eldest daughter Electra. Driven mad by grief, she haunts the palace making threats; forbidden to leave or marry because of her continuing loyalty to her dead father, she vows revenge when her brother Orestes is old enough to return and carry it out.

Theatre review: The American Plan

It's always nice when a play caters to my interests right from the start, like The American Plan does by opening with Luke Allen-Gale climbing out of a lake in bathing trunks, soaking wet. He eventually puts his clothes back on but Richard Greenberg's play soon compensates in other ways. It's July 1960 and Nick (Allen-Gale) is the son of an old wealthy New York family, holidaying with friends in the Catskills. Finding the resort's full schedule of "fun" oppressive, he swims across the lake to an odd-looking house owned by Eva (Diana Quick,) a Jewish refugee who escaped Germany on the last ship out, before her husband came up with a useful but unexciting invention that made their fortune. Nick is captivated by Eva's daughter Lili (Emily Taaffe,) a compulsive fantasist who enjoys teasing him with lies like how her late father's mysterious invention was a reversible condom.