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: God of Carnage

I hadn't initially booked for the Lyric Hammersmith's revival of God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's follow-up to "Art" - I'd seen the original West End production of Christopher Hampton's translation, and remembered not being particularly fussed by it. A great cast made the difference when it was announced, and got me back to Reza's other story of insufferably upper-middle class people having a meltdown in a joylessly chic living room. Ladies and Gentlemen: The French. We're in Veronica (Freema Agyeman) and Michael Novak's (Martin Hutson) flat, where they're hosting Alan (Ariyon Bakare) and Annette Raleigh (Dinita Gohil) for the afternoon. The Raleighs' 11-year-old son Ferdinand has hit the Novaks' son Bruno with a bamboo cane in the school playground, knocking out two of his teeth.

Theatre review: The Father and the Assassin

Despite, or perhaps because of, the amount of extra-long shows I've seen recently, I seem to be in the mood to see something epic at the theatre lately - in scope if not necessarily in length. The Olivier is a natural home for that kind of event, and the latest premiere there seemed like it might deliver. The good news is that Anupama Chandrasekhar's The Father and the Assassin does that in spades, and in a subtler way than the huge stage might suggest. The Father of the title is Mohandas Gandhi (Paul Bazely), but the play's real focus is on the man who killed him, Nathuram Godse (Shubham Saraf.) Godse narrates his story, and begins by running his own childhood in parallel with the rise of Gandhi to political prominence with his Ahimsa philosophy of non-violent resistance.

Stage-to-screen review: Twelfth Night(RSC / RST & Marquee TV)

Christopher Luscombe's Shakespeare productions tend to have a touch of the Merchant/Ivory to them, and so it is with this 2017 production of Twelfth Night, one of the few productions of the RSC's current run through the complete works that I'd missed until now, when it's just been added to Marquee TV's roster. Simon Higlett's set and costume designs are of a sumptious, solid kind a thrust stage like the RST rarely seems to need or bother with, and Nigel Hess' music is used like a movie score, much like he and Luscombe experimented with a decade earlier in their Merry Wives of Windsor for the Globe. The period movie they're making here is a Victorian one, where Shakespeare's fictional Illyrian coast becomes London and the countryside, by now comparatively easily accessible by train.