Theatre review: The Homecoming

Jamie Lloyd has dropped the "Trafalgar Transformed" branding but he still returns to Trafalgar Studio 1 for his third season of plays; and after the first season's The Hothouse, both Harold Pinter and John Simm are back on the menu with The Homecoming. Somewhere in a dodgy corner of East London is the house where Teddy (Gary Kemp) grew up; he left six years ago, just about keeping in touch enough to let his father Max (Ron Cook) know that he's moved to an American university to teach philosophy. What he neglected to tell his family was that just before he left he got married; so his return in the middle of the night is a surprise but an even bigger one is his wife Ruth (Gemma Chan.) The menacing, aggressively macho environment is one Teddy soon regrets returning to. But far from feeling threatened, Ruth actually seems to thrive in her new surroundings.

Theatre review: Yellow Face

The temporary auditorium outside the National Theatre was meant to have closed by now, but its success has led to an extension of its lifespan by a few years. What hasn't been as long-lived is the name The Shed, which seems to have been caught up in a copyright muddle, and as a result the venue doesn't currently have a name. That won't do, so until the National come up with a better suggestion, I'm going to call the big red wooden box Keith. Keith's first show is David Henry Hwang's semi-autobiographical Yellow Face, about a late-'90s witch hunt against Chinese-Americans, largely forgotten as 9/11 soon provided a new source of racial paranoia. The story starts a few years earlier and, having won a Tony for his play M. Butterfly, Hwang was one of the most prominent Asian-Americans on Broadway around the time Miss Saigon came to town, bringing with it Jonathan Pryce in yellowface.

Theatre review: Our Ajax

A figure of pure brute force, Ajax isn't one of the best-loved heroes of the Trojan War, better known nowadays for his bathroom scouring abilities. Timberlake Wertenbaker admits in her introduction to the playtext that Sophocles' play about him was hard for her to get to grips with. So her new version Our Ajax takes a different tack to most of her classical translations, more explicitly superimposing a modern story of Afghanistan over the one set in Troy - with only partial success. We first meet Ajax (Joe Dixon) dragging bloody corpses across the stage: When his nemesis Odysseus (Adam Riches) was promoted above him, Ajax snapped and murdered him and all his soldiers. Or so he thinks: In fact the goddess Athena (Gemma Chan) cast a confusion spell over him to protect Odysseus, and he actually slaughtered the allied army's goats and dogs.