Theatre review: Archduke

I've had varied responses to American playwright Rajiv Joseph's work so far, a writer fond of surreal history plays focusing on people at the sidelines of great events. Though not quite as tight and memorable as Guards at the Taj, the latest of his plays to get a UK premiere (it does seem to take them a few years to make it over here) certainly didn't try my patience in the way Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo did. Archduke is named after the most famous person ever to hold that title, although Franz Ferdinand probably wouldn't have been pleased to find out why he got remembered for so long. The play doesn't, though, actually introduce us to the Archduke himself or stage his assassination, remembered as the inciting incident of the First World War. Instead the opening scene feels like Waiting for Godot but bearable, as two down-on-their-luck young men meet in an abandoned train tunnel and exchange gently confused conversation.

Theatre review: American Psycho

The Almeida will continue to have shows programmed in the Rupert Goold era running for the rest of this year, but for his final show there as director he does what Rufus Norris did when exiting the National, and revisits a hit musical he directed there just before taking on the Artistic Director job: Here that means American Psycho, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (book) and Duncan Sheik's (music and lyrics) adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' twisted satire of capitalism. Patrick Bateman (Arty Froushan) is the archetypal young Wall Street broker working in Murders and Executions (or is it Mergers and Acquisitions?) flashing the latest tech, fashions and products to show how well he's doing for himself. But for all that he's the go-to man at his firm for questions of 1980s etiquette, he always feels sure someone else is doing just that little bit better than him.

Theatre review: Hamlet (RSC / RST)

It's 14 years since Rupert Goold last worked at the RSC, and almost a decade since he last directed a Shakespeare play. Now he returns to close off the new leadership's first year in the main house, and in his time away the director who brought us horror movie Macbeth, emo Romeo & Juliet and The Merchant of Vegas hasn't forgotten how to come up with a high concept. Although whether he can still pull the concept off might be a matter of opinion. Goold brings with him one of his big discoveries from his time at the Almeida, throwing Luke Thallon into the deep end for his first professional Shakespeare role as Hamlet. The titular character is Prince of Denmark, having recently lost his father but not succeeded him as king. That title has gone to his uncle Claudius (Jared Harris,) who as well as his brother's crown has also claimed his widow: Weeks after the old king's funeral Claudius has married Hamlet's mother Gertrude (Nancy Carroll.)

Theatre review: Coriolanus (National Theatre)

This year's National Theatre Shakespeare is a fairly rarely-performed one, and one that I'm generally pretty happy to have stay that way; it does though get a big selling point in David Oyelowo making a long-awaited return to the stage to play Coriolanus. Set in the days of the Roman Republic, Oyelowo's Caius Martius is a nobleman and general who earned his titular surname by almost single-handedly sacking the city of Coriolis, stronghold of the enemy Volscians. On his return to Rome, among the honours heaped on him is the expectation that the next stage in his career will be election as Consul, a position of considerable political power. But first he has to gain the support of the public, whose Tribunes Sicinius and Brutus (Stephanie Street and Jordan Metcalfe) are determined to show him up as unsuitable for power.

Theatre review: Dear England

I said a few weeks ago that the National had managed a bit of a coup by scheduling probably the two most bankable British playwrights at the moment to premiere new work at the same time in its main houses. And if it was Jack Thorne in the Lyttelton, with a play that's already announced a West End transfer, then it must be James Graham in the Olivier, with a play that's bringing in audiences that don't often come to the theatre, and seems likely to have a future life of its own as a result. Dear England is a play about football, so Rupert Goold is the obvious choice of director - I could say it's because he made his name with a dynamic, physical visual style that suits a sports story but let's face it, it's because when he took over at the Almeida he waxed lyrical about how handy his new office was for Arsenal home games, as much as anything he had to say about the theatre itself.

Theatre review: The Motive and the Cue

The National Theatre has lured a couple of the most commercially successful British playwrights amd screenwriters to the South Bank to premiere new shows this season, starting with Jack Thorne in the Lyttelton, with stage and screen director Sam Mendes at the helm of a play about screen stars, and what draws them to the stage. The Motive and the Cue is inspired by the real story of Richard Burton (Johnny Flynn,) who in the middle of the honeymoon for (one of) his marriages to Elizabeth Taylor (Tuppence Middleton) went to Broadway to rehearse for Hamlet. John Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) had already become a legendary Shakespearean actor by his mid-20s, but by 1964 and at the age of 60 his glory days seem to be far behind him.

Theatre review: The Hunt

From the first Rupert Goold productions I saw I've associated the director with the ability to put the nightmarish on stage (in a good way,) and it's not a knack he's lost as his latest Almeida show plays out like a horror film, innocuous beginnings building to hair-raising tension. But there's no serial killers or supernatural elements to The Hunt, David Farr's adaptation of a Danish film by Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm. Instead there's two very modern fears at play, the one of monsters in our midst and the other of being falsely accused of being one of those monsters. Of course my main current image of Denmark is of somewhere almost empty, apart from the odd person suddenly keeling over dead or running around yelling "Rasmuuuuuuuuuuus!" and, while the town where the play's set isn't quite that deserted, it's clearly been shrinking in recent years.

Theatre review: Aristocrats

…so the agent says “And what do you call this act?”

Aristocrats is the latest in the Donald and Margot Warehouse’s occasional focus on Irish theatre, and the second Brian Friel play in London this summer after Translations – written in 1979, this immediately predates it. Tom (Paul Higgins) is an American academic writing a paper on Irish Catholic manor houses and the families who’ve lived in them for centuries. He’s doing research at Ballybeg Hall, once presided over by Judge O’Donnell (James Laurenson,) who ever since suffering a stroke has been confined to his room in a state of confusion, cared for 24/7 by his eldest daughter Judith (Eileen Walsh.) Youngest daughter Claire (Aisling Loftus,) heavily medicated after a lifetime of depression and anxiety, is about to get married so their siblings Alice (Elaine Cassidy) and Casimir (David Dawson) have returned for the wedding from their homes in England and Germany respectively; a fourth sister is a nun who hasn’t returned from her mission in Africa for years.

Theatre review: The Lehman Trilogy

After having apparently been a hit across Europe, Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy gets its first English-language version from Ben Power, and a glossy production at the Lyttelton from Sam Mendes. Apart from very brief glimpses of supernumeraries, the three-and-a-half hour play is cast only with three actors, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley. In the current theatrical climate it's hard not to notice that a banner production at the National Theatre exclusively stars middle-aged white men, but then it's hard to argue that the middle-aged white men they're playing haven't had a significant enough effect on today's world for their story to need to be told: The fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was the trigger for the most recent global recession, whose political after-effects are very much coming to play now; this is the story of the men who created the company, and the descendants who steered it in directions that helped put global finance on a knife-edge.

Theatre review: Girls & Boys

A good run of plays in the last few days continues at the Royal Court, a theatre that Vicky Featherstone has put at the centre of the response to, and attempts to change, the culture of sexual misconduct in theatre as well as other industries. But while all this has been blowing up over the last six months, the season Featherstone programmed before all that already featured a number of relevant shows. Perhaps not quite as on-the-nose as Rita, Sue and Bob, Too, the title of Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys gives away that he’ll be looking at the relationship between the sexes, and despite its sole cast member being female is ultimately a look at masculinity, and whether it is by definition toxic. Lyndsey Turner directs Carey Mulligan as the unnamed Performer, who for the most part narrates directly to the audience, starting with the story of meeting a man in an EasyJet queue and, after a shaky start, being thoroughly charmed by him.

Theatre review: Ugly Lies the Bone

Lindsey Ferrentino's Ugly Lies the Bone is a play for only five actors - one of whom stays offstage almost throughout - looking at a domestic situation. There's a reason it's landed on the big Lyttelton stage at the National though, and that's because it also encompasses a much larger world, albeit a virtual one. Jess (Kate Fleetwood) has returned from her third tour in Afghanistan after getting caught in an IED explosion, with horrific burns that cover half her face and much of her body. She's in constant pain and coming back to where she grew up doesn't even have the comfort of familiarity: Her Florida town's economy was based around space shuttle launches, but with NASA ending the programme the town has dried up, jobs are scarce and it's becoming a ghost town. Her mother is now in a nursing home with dementia, and Jess refuses to visit her because she's afraid she won't recognise her.

Theatre review: Faith Healer

Is it still a coup de théâtre if it happens before the show even starts? On a large proscenium arch stage, a curtain of rain is a dramatic but familiar special effect, but entering the Donmar Warehouse for Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, the audience is met with torrential rain on three sides of the thrust stage, falling just a foot away from the front row. The effect returns a couple of times during the evening to facilitate some quick changes to Es Devlin's set, as Friel's play is made up of three connected monologues, giving complementary and conflicting versions of the same events. First up is the titular faith healer himself, Frank (Stephen Dillane,) an understated showman - the "faith" part of his profession is never mentioned - who tours small villages in Wales and Scotland with his wife and tour manager.

Theatre review: Linda

Penelope Skinner's Linda opens with the title character bemoaning the fact that cosmetics for women over fifty are regularly advertised with images of much younger women. There'd be irony in the 55-year-old Linda being played by an actor ten years younger, if it weren't for the fact that she's a very last-minute replacement: When Kim Cattrall pulled out of the production with less than a week to go, the Royal Court turned to Noma Dumezweni, who'd only recently worked with director Michael Longhurst, and who's due to make her own directorial debut there next year. Dumezweni's won an Olivier, although hopefully she doesn't bring it up in conversation quite as often as Linda does the marketing award she won ten years ago. She's head of branding at a beauty company, and her "Changing the world, one girl at a time" campaign helped turn them from an obscure brand to a world leader, with a charity arm that funds self-confidence workshops for young women. Now that she's over fifty herself, her new project is for the company to stop women her age from feeling invisible, both in their outreach programmes and in the way they market their products.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Barbican Theatre)

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The press haven't yet been invited to this. Not that they felt they needed an invitation as, notoriously, a few papers couldn't wait to get some of that Benadryl Cumulonimbus publicity, and printed reviews of the first preview. You know, like those evil unprofessional theatre bloggers sometimes do.

Actually I'm not even sure if this was originally meant to be a preview performance when I first booked my tickets, as I think the original press night was moved back. In any case, the ticket prices weren't discounted for previews, which is the traditional quid pro quo for an early audience seeing a show that's not been locked down yet. And a couple of weeks into the run Lyndsey Turner's production of Hamlet still doesn't feel locked down. Hamlet (Benelux Cenotaph) is the Prince of Denmark who, at the opening of the play, is dealing with a sense of general dissatisfaction that can't just be put down to his father's recent death. Instead of being crowned himself, he's had to stand back and watch his uncle Claudius (Ciarán Hinds) not only take the throne, but also marry Hamlet's mother Gertrude (Anastasia Hille.)

Theatre review: Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

Things would probably be better all round for everyone (especially me) if I could have made this a non-review, but while I was tempted, I didn't leave Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at the interval like so many people. It was probably more the fact that this is the inaugural production from the NT's new team in charge that brought me back, rather than any real faith that the second act might be better (it wasn't.) Caryl Churchill's 1976 play is a look at the English Civil War, specifically one side of it - the Levellers and the peasants who backed them up, ending up with the deposition and execution of Charles I, and the installation of Oliver Cromwell (Daniel Flynn.) Though all fighting on one side, their motivations, religious beliefs and what they ultimately expect from their rebellion vary wildly and, using in part edited transcripts of real debates, Churchill shows us, in great detail, the major and minor points on which they differed, and what they actually got in the end.

Theatre review: The Nether

Jeremy Herrin's first show as director since taking over Headlong is a co-production with his old stomping ground at the Royal Court, where he brings the UK premiere of an unsettling American play to the Downstairs stage. The Nether is a future iteration of the internet that's not only highly realistic but also totally immersive. It hasn't quite managed to replicate touch yet but a virtual community called The Hideaway seems to have perfected it. The trouble is that The Hideaway is a community for paedophiles, a virtual Victorian estate where "Poppa" invites his guests to spend time with his children. As The Nether acquires a fledgling police force, Detective Morris (Amanda Hale) has managed to track down the man behind Poppa and his realm, the aptly-named Sims (Stanley Townsend.) Taking him in for questioning "in-world" (i.e. in the real, non-virtual world,) Morris tries to get him to reveal the whereabouts of his server.

Theatre review: American Psycho

The last two Doctors have both undergone remarkable physical transformations on the London stage at the moment, and while David Tennant's makeover as Alanis Morisette is... special, I reckon it's trumped by Matt Smith's ridiculously buff, frequently scantily-clad regeneration into Patrick Bateman, the titular character of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Smith's casting has of course been the only talking point ever since it was announced, rather overshadowing the other unusual thing about this premiere production: The songwriter behind Spring Awakening has turned the blood- and sex-drenched 1980s satire into a musical. When Smith's Bateman is first raised onto the stage through the trapdoor, he's perfecting his tan on his own sunbed. The skin, like the muscles under it and the clothes over it, is all part of the image that has to radiate success.

Theatre review: Chimerica

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I really don't remember booking a preview performance for this, but think the press night might have been brought back after I booked; it's now next week.

Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica opens at the Almeida complete with three cast members (Benedict Wong, Andrew Leung and David Tse) from Hampstead's just-ended #aiww¹, and like that play it looks at the rise of China and how the ruling party treats those who don't toe the line. But as the title suggests this time there's two nations being thrown together, and at the heart of Kirkwood's new play is the relationship between China and America, and how the two nations view each other. Spanning 23 years over two continents, and coming in at over three hours, this is an epic in more ways than one. Set during last year's US Presidential election campaign, the action is haunted by the deaths of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and especially by that day's best-known image of a lone man standing in front of a row of advancing tanks.