Theatre review: Julie

As Vanessa Kirby’s Julie first walks onto the stage rubbing cocaine into her gums I couldn’t help thinking: You can recast Princess Margaret, but you can’t shake her off that easily. Polly Stenham has updated Strindberg’s Miss Julie to the present day, and the spoilt daughter of a millionaire who hasn’t come home to celebrate her 33rd birthday with her. A lot of people she barely knows have turned up though, and on Tom Scutt’s split-level set a party rages in the background while the quieter drama plays out in the kitchen downstage, where her father’s chauffeur Jean (Eric Kofi Abrefa) and housekeeper Kristina (Thalissa Teixeira) are tidying up. Julie herself keeps wandering listlessly in to get away from her own birthday party, and to avoid the hangers-on upstairs. Jean and Kristina have recently got engaged, but Julie’s been ditched by her own fiancé, and is looking for someone to fill the void. The emotional void, not her vagina. Although also her vagina.

Theatre review: Labyrinth

Playwright Beth Steel seems to like titles reminiscent of kids' classics: Much as her Wonderland featured miners at the bottom of the tunnel rather than a white rabbit, her Labyrinth offers up bankers instead of David Bowie and muppets. In fact the reference that most often came to mind was Lucy Prebble's ENRON, as Labyrinth too aims to illustrate more recent financial collapse through the story of a historical one - in this case the late 1970s / early 1980s mountain of debt that crippled South America. Hampstead Theatre have brought back their recent discover Sean Delaney and put a whole show on his shoulders as John, son of a fraudster and determined to make a fortune in a more reputable way himself. He's taken on by a bank that specialises in making loans to foreign governments, and learns from Alpha male Charlie (Tom Weston-Jones) how the world is run on behind-the-scenes handshake deals.

Theatre review: The Glass Menagerie (Headlong)

Tennessee Williams' early masterpiece The Glass Menagerie has suddenly proved popular for fresh interpretation; the production in Southampton was a bit too far for me, but Headlong's tour includes a stop at Richmond, which is certainly doable, especially when it's an adventurous company taking on one of my favourite playwrights. Ellen McDougall's production is very much stripped down - not in the way that its star Greta Scacchi used to be best known for but in a way that, like so much else in the last 18 months, wears an Ivo van Hove influence on its sleeve. Fly Davis' set is a black box, bare except for a staircase, a couple of lamps and a single snowglobe representing the collection of glass animals that gives the play its title. But this isn't too far a departure from what's intended, as the prologue informs us this is a memory play where everything is a bit hidden in shadow and fuzzy around the edges, its narrator - an obvious stand-in for Williams in this autobiographical work - an unreliable one.

Theatre review: Wildefire

Constable Gail Wilde (Lorraine Stanley) was a minor character in a Roy Williams play, who the playwright decided he'd like to see as the central figure in her own right. The result is Wildefire, which premieres in the main house as part of Hampstead's police-themed season that also includes State Red Downstairs. Patrolling a quiet town isn't quite fulfilling enough for Wilde, who at the start of the play transfers to the Metropolitan Police. With stories of her grandfather making a real difference on the same beat, she stays cheerfully optimistic in the face of cynicism from her partner Spence (Ricky Champ,) who keeps an unauthorised informant (Eric Kofi Abrefa) out of his own pocket, and isn't above outbreaks of violence. When things become personal, though, Wilde finds that the pressure soon leads her to even greater extremes than Spence.

Theatre review: A Taste of Honey

A seminal kitchen sink play, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey gets revived by Bijan Sheibani at the Lyttelton. At the tail end of the 1950s Helen (Lesley Sharp) arrives at the small, grubby Salford flat she's rented, accompanied by her teenage daughter Josephine (Kate O'Flynn.) It's far from the first time they've moved; the alcoholic Helen's past is full of failed love affairs and every time one sours she's moved to a new town, dragging her daughter with her. But this time Helen's found a wealthy younger man she won't let slip through her fingers - when the spivvy Peter (Dean Lennox Kelly) proposes, she's soon married and moved in with him, leaving Jo to deal with a marriage proposal of her own: She knows sailor Jimmie (Eric Kofi Abrefa) is only really after one thing but she doesn't care. Soon he's back at sea, and she's alone and pregnant.

Theatre review: The Amen Corner

Marianne Jean-Baptiste makes a rare return to the London stage to take the lead in James Baldwin's 1965 play The Amen Corner at the National. She's sister Margaret, pastor at a Harlem church, with very strict rules she expects her flock to live by (despite the fact that one of her parishioners is desperate for work, she refuses to condone him accepting a job driving a whiskey delivery truck, even though he wouldn't be drinking himself.) Her style of preaching seems to have made her popular in the church but the first sign of weakness prompts the animosity of the church elders to come to the surface. Sister Margaret's absence for a week is the first thing to rile them - her trip to visit an affiliate church in Philadelphia makes them wonder why they're paying for it out of church funds. But it's her family life that'll prove the real Achilles heel.

Theatre review: Choir Boy

The cross-dressing black American playwright Tarrell Alvin McCraney first made his name with a well-received trilogy of plays. Unfortunately I didn't see those, and only caught up with his work for his last two plays - both of which were pretty universally panned. So would his return to the Royal Court also prove a return to form, and help me see (although I didn't hate the other two plays, I wasn't blown away either) what the fuss was about?

Choir Boy takes place in an all-male, all-black US prep school, where the Headmaster (Gary McDonald) tries to juggle the tensions of a hormone-filled building with keeping the alumni happy and their all-important donations coming in. And this is a school board that's easily offended: As the play begins they're demanding he punish Pharus (Dominic Smith) because he briefly looked behind him while singing the school song at commencement.