Theatre review: Othello (RSC / RST)

After a soft-launch of comparatively rare plays in generally fun productions, the Evans/Harvey era of the RSC gets its first big-ticket Shakespeare revival, and all I can say is I hope the opening six months are a more accurate sign of what's to come than Tim Carroll's interminable, dusty go at Othello. Judith Bowden's costumes put us squarely in the original setting of Renaissance Venice, enjoying a period of sustained military success in large part thanks to the black general Othello (John Douglas Thompson.) As such, when Turkey invades the Venetian colonies in Cyprus, he has to interrupt his honeymoon to lead the counter-attack, but he takes his new wife Desdemona (Juliet Rylance) with him, and they remain there for the handover of power. But unbeknownst to him Othello has an enemy in his most trusted lieutenant, Iago (Will Keen.)

Theatre review: Appropriate

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has been an up-and-coming name in American playwriting in the last couple of years – I personally liked An Octoroon, if not as much as everyone else seemed to, while being less convinced by Gloria, but it was hard to deny the obvious potential. For my money this is the one where that potential is realised (albeit in a play written five years ago,) as the Donmar Warehouse stages the UK premiere of Appropriate. On the surface this is the playwright’s most conventional play to date, being his take on That American Play Where An Extended Family Gets Together After A Long Time, Preferably At Thanksgiving But That’s Optional. Six months after the death of their reclusive father, the Lafayette siblings and their families go to his plantation house in Arkansas; he was a hoarder who left half a million dollars in debt, so they have a lot of work to do clearing the place up so that his belongings can be sold in an estate sale, and the house and land sold at auction.

Theatre review: As You Like It (Open Air Theatre)

Second time lucky at the Open Air Theatre's As You Like It - if you thought London hadn't had a drop of rain for weeks you weren't in NW1 last Friday, when it came down so heavily the performance was abandoned before it could even start. Although this afternoon's grey clouds never resolved themselves into another downpour the fates still seemed against me seeing this production: At least two audience members fainted 20 minutes in, leading to a pause in the performance, and the least said about the pigeon that tried to land on my head in the second act the better. But Max Webster's production made it to the end, and the multiple marriages at the end of one of the more music-heavy Shakespeare plays, made even more so here with some original compositions by Charlie Fink.

Theatre review: The Rest Is Silence

The latest radical reworking of a familiar text as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, dreamthinkspeak's The Rest Is Silence is a "meditation on Hamlet" (I know, but achingly pretentious publicity doesn't always mean an achingly pretentious show; just most of the time.) A promenade production, it puts the audience in the middle of a room surrounded by glass screens, like an aquarium. The tanks behind the screens light up in turn to reveal an Elsinore conceived as a gleaming modern luxury apartment. (There's also a persistent smell of rotting rubbish, but I don't think that's part of the design, just that Riverside Studios has the audience enter via an alley by the bins.)