Theatre review: Macbeth (Shakespeare's Globe / Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank)

A familiar annual feature at Shakespeare's Globe has been the Playing Shakespeare With Deutsche Bank production created specially for schools, which gives away thousands of free tickets to students. Its popularity has seen it become increasingly open to general audiences, and after a couple of past productions were made available online during lockdown, this year's has been given an additional few weeks' run after the school parties have seen it. The fact that the shows are heavily edited meant that for the first time ever I felt able to risk a standing ticket among the groundlings without too much fear of putting my back out, so after over a decade seeing most shows at the Globe I finally got to be right at the front of the action, where Rose Revitt's design has added a deep thrust into the yard. As these shows are tied to the school curriculum I don't remember it ever being anything other than Macbeth or Romeo & Juliet, and the fact that this thrust is a blasted heath is a clue as to whose turn it is.

Stage-to-screen review: OUTSIDE

Well, we can add another authentic theatre experience to the streaming equivalent: Those times a show has to be interrupted due to a technical hitch (and you're not sure how long it'll take to fix, should you go to the loo in case the show overruns a lot, or will you be out of your seat when it starts again?) Following last month's INSIDE, the Orange Tree live stream returns with a second trio of new short plays - this time all written by people who've worked at the venue before, if not necessarily as a writer. Unsurprisingly the theme this time is OUTSIDE, and Sonali Bhattacharyya's Two Billion Beats interprets this as a school playground, where star pupil Asha (Zainab Hasan) is uncharacteristically having to clean up graffiti as detention, while her little sister Bettina (Ashna Rabheru) loiters, not wanting to get on the bus alone and get bullied. Unfortunately I can't critique Two Billion Beats as Hasan's microphone failed just as we were getting to the crux of the play, so I didn't hear most of her dialogue from that point on; but the start did seem promising, with Asha comparing her school essay-writing technique to clickbait that gets her teacher hooked.

Theatre review: Amsterdam

The Orange Tree's autumn season opens with the UK premiere of a play whose urgent theme and potentially fascinating story get buried under its frenetic, wilfully eccentric storytelling device. Maya Arad Yasur's Amsterdam, translated here by Eran Edry, follows a reasonably successful Israeli violinist now based in the titular Dutch city, heavily pregnant when her gas gets cut off and a €1700 bill arrives for it. The unpaid debt originates from 1944 and has been accumulating interest and fines ever since. Her enquiries into the bill's history reveal that it's not been forgotten or fallen through the cracks, but been left deliberately unpaid by generations of the late landlady's family because its very existence adds insult to historic injury.

Theatre review: The Rolling Stone

Chris Urch had a miner hit* with Land of Our Fathers, which will be getting another London run later this year, and in the meantime another of his plays gets a further life (having originally played in Manchester after winning the Bruntwood Prize,) as Ellen McDougall directs Urch's look at a very different subject. The Rolling Stone takes its title from a Ugandan newspaper that takes particular glee in the country's anti-gay laws: Notoriously, it publishes the names, addresses and photos of homosexuals with the intention that they be arrested or, just as likely, lynched. It's a poisonous environment to set a gay love story, in which 18-year-old Dembe (Fiston Barek) meets Ugandan-Irish doctor Sam (Julian Moore-Cook,) and the couple start a surprisingly laid-back relationship. When Dembe's father dies, his older brother Joe (Sule Rimi) is elected pastor of their church, but not unanimously - those who object to such a young pastor will keep a particularly close eye on Joe and his family.

Theatre review: Routes

Rachel De-lahay returns to the Royal Court Upstairs after The Westbridge with her follow-up Routes, which sees two men coming from opposite directions to end up in the same place: A detention centre for illegal immigrants waiting for deportation. The more obvious route is that taken by Femi (Peter Bankolé,) a Nigerian man whose family are living legally in London, but who for reasons that are revealed later can't join them through official channels. He deals with the shifty Abiola (Seun Shote,) always demanding bigger sums of money to get him his fake passport and visa to the UK, but the attempt to slip past Immigration looks less likely to succeed the more we find out about Femi. The real heart of the story though is a route that starts closer to home, in a London hostel and halfway house.