Theatre review: As You Like It (RSC / RST)

For my second As You Like It of the year (second of a planned three, which in most years would make it the most ubiquitous Shakespeare play, but Macbeth has got plans guys,) Omar Elerian's RSC debut has a high-concept cast: Two of them are former presidents of Equity. Oh, and almost all of them are over 70. The conceit (quite simply delivered in a speech to the audience at the start, something any number of elaborate artistic visions might want to consider,) is that this isn't so much a production of As You Like It as a memory of one, an imagined 1975 production from which all the cast members with any significant amount of lines have conveniently survived, and have reconvened in a rehearsal room to try and recreate. A quartet of younger actors join them to read in the roles of absent friends, as well as to help get the leads back on their feet after any scenes that require particular exertion.

Theatre review: Lawrence After Arabia

Howard Brenton’s latest trip into history looks at the man best known as Lawrence of Arabia - although as the title Lawrence After Arabia suggests, it doesn't look at T.E. Lawrence's most famous deeds except in flashback. In fact most of the action takes place in the home of George Bernard Shaw, where Lawrence (Jack Laskey) liked to hide away from the press, despite the fact that his friend's own fame meant reporters were rarely far away. Jeff Rawle plays Shaw, or possibly Captain Birdseye, and Geraldine James his wife Charlotte, who takes on the job of editing Lawrence's autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and discovers more in it than she'd expected. John Dove, who's directed Brenton's work at the Globe before, now moves to the playwright's other regular haunt on Hampstead's main stage, and a story that opens with Lawrence a national hero after his victories in the Middle East during World War I.