Theatre review: Sherlock Holmes

Many of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories have been put on the stage over the years, with various degrees of seriousness, but now that the character is fully out of copyright writers have also been free to write the great detective into their own, new adventures. Books, film and TV have done it and now Joel Horwood does it at a theatre whose nearest tube station is, appropriately enough, Baker Street. At least that's the theory behind the play simply titled Sherlock Holmes, which opens the Open Air Theatre's season with the promise of a new mystery. What Horwood actually gives us is a deconstruction of the iconic detective and his place in British culture, a central conceit that's pretty bold and iconoclastic - is just a shame that the way it's actually delivered leaves a lot to be desired.

Theatre review: Guess How Much I Love You?

The Royal Court opens its seventieth anniversary year with one of its most notorious memes, although I'm not sure I would even count Luke Norris' Guess How Much I Love You Question Mark as part of that tradition, and not just because it doesn't take place in the Upstairs Theatre: The venue has traditionally used dead babies for shock value, but Norris' story takes the possibility of a baby dying and goes somewhere a lot more human and moving. It opens with an unnamed couple halfway through a pregnancy scan, playing Twenty Questions and discussing baby names, partly to distract them from the fact that the sonographer left them abruptly to get a second opinion, and has been gone for an unusually long time. We next meet Her (Rosie Sheehy) and Him (Robert Aramayo) during a sleepless night, after they've received a devastating diagnosis.

Theatre review: Cyrano de Bergerac

My last encounter with Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac was Jamie Lloyd's rap battle reinvention, a version that won't be forgotten in a hurry. But while Simon Evans' production for the RSC is more traditional - nose and all - it proves striking and emotional in its own way. Adrian Lester plays Cyrano, who leads a troop of 17th century French army reserves, and is a curious mix of extremes. He's confident to the point of arrogance in his abilities both with a sword and with words, and with good reason: He can fight off a hundred men at a time, or take a man down in verbal combat instead. He's as likely to do either to any man who dares mention his unusual appearance, the reason for the contrasting, wildly insecure side of his personality: Since childhood he has been bullied for his unusually large nose.

Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare's Globe)

George Fouracres seems to be absolutely speeding his way through the big Shakespearean comic roles at the Globe, and has already got to Sir John Falstaff - the slightly alternate Merry Wives of Windsor version who tends to be portrayed as a bit fluffier than the manipulative old thief of the Henriad. Although maybe not so different in Sean Holmes' new take, which leans into the fact that, like many a later farce, this one also builds its embarrassments and misunderstandings on some pretty dark motivations. So Fouracres' Falstaff has to win the audience's sympathy through the humiliations he's put through - he's a bombastic bully who makes jokes about drowning puppies, and plots to seduce two married women less out of lust than malice: He'll enjoy humiliating their husbands by cuckolding them, and maybe burgle their houses as well while he's there.

Theatre review: Inside No.9 - Stage/Fright

"Janette Krankie wouldn't look us in the eye."

"That's 'cause she's only 4ft."

Last year Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's comedy/horror anthology Inside No.9 ended after, somewhat inevitably, 9 series, but as a final farewell to the show the writer/stars have reunited for a stage version, Stage/Fright. This is a mix of greatest hits of the series itself, and new material that could only work on stage, and although the TV show did experiment with various genres outside of its original Tales of the Unexpected roots, this new stage extension to the canon focuses on the queasy mix of sometimes cheesy comedy and jump-scare horror that feels like the series' purest form (so in the unlikely event that anyone was hoping for the utter bleakness of something like "The Last Weekend" or "The Trolley Problem" drawn out to two-and-a-half hours, I guess they'll be disappointed.)

Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare's Globe)

Apparently Shakespeare's Globe is out of the worst of its post-lockdown budget hole, which hopefully means Michelle Terry (who let's not forget chucked The Two Noble Kinsmen into her inaugural season) won't be quite as obliged to programme just the hits, which has essentially seen the venue having to reboot A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing in alternate years. But for the time being it's an even-numbered year so I guess it's the latter they have to find a new take on, even as Lucy Bailey's production still feels fresh in my memory. At least Much Ado is a play the Globe rarely seems to fudge, and Sean Holmes' take on it is no exception. Grace Smart's design seems to take inspiration from the text's laboured pun on Seville oranges to set the action in an orange grove, and the cast seem to be liberally handing out fruit to the groundlings in a production that makes particularly good use of the shared space with the audience.

Theatre review: The Wonderful World of Dissocia

Anthony Neilson is certainly a playwright of extremes - I've seen plays of his that have ranged from horror to panto, occasionally within the same scene. Sometimes this is a response to mental illness, like Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness, the surreal freak show he wrote as an antidote to a bout of depression. A play that deals even more directly with the theme is one I'd heard of but never had the chance to see before: The Wonderful World of Dissocia, which Emma Baggott revives at Stratford East. Lisa (Leah Harvey) has been feeling out of sorts for a while, and the reason is revealed when she tries to get her watch mended. Watch repairer Victor (Hollywood Body Double Leander Deeny) reveals that there's nothing wrong with the timepiece, it's Lisa who's an hour out of time: She was on a delayed plane when the clocks went back in October, and she never got back the hour she lost when they went forwards the previous March.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

From Sir Andrew Aguecheek straight to Hamlet is an unusual career progression but it's the one George Fouracres has taken since joining the Globe's ensemble cast last summer. After two standout comic turns the announcement he'd be playing Shakespeare's most famous tragic lead was welcome news to me, especially after the last Hamlet I saw actively played against any trace of humour or likeability in the character. Sean Holmes' production is the first time the play's been tackled indoors in the Swanamaker, and the first in the venue since the current Artistic Director played the role in her opening season. And there's some similarities between this and the Michelle Terry version in a general approach that avoids one overarching conceit; but Holmes' production both takes this experimentation with ideas several steps further, and results in, for my money at least, a much more entertaining - if far from cohesive - evening overall.

Theatre review: Metamorphoses

With the last few outdoor shows at Shakespeare's Globe still running, the summer season concludes by taking us back inside the Swanamaker for the delayed end result of the new Scriptorium project: Billed as the first time the Globe has had a team of writers-in-residence in 400 years, the first year of the project culminated in the team of Sami Ibrahim, Laura Lomas and Sabrina Mahfouz collaborating on a play that, appropriately enough, mixes the old with the new. The stories are almost as old as they get, with a collection of Greco-Roman mythology as collected by Ovid in his Metamorphoses; the storytelling style, treating the stories with a mix of respect and irreverence, is both fresh and well-suited to the intimate space. Sean Holmes and Holly Race Roughan direct a cast of four - Steffan Donnelly, Fiona Hampton, Charlie Josephine and Irfan Shamji - who tell some of the best-known, as well as some of the more obscure myths, especially those, as the title suggests, that feature their lead characters going through a magical transformation.

Stage-to-screen review: My Beautiful Laundrette

Leicester's Curve Theatre continues to dip into its archive recordings to provide online content and fundraise during lockdown; latest is last year's My Beautiful Laundrette, adapted by Hanif Kureishi from his own screenplay. It's something of a rollercoaster ride during the early eighties for an extended Pakistani-British family, rising above the general wave of unemployment by building a small business empire (albeit one that isn't quite as legal and respectable as it initially appears) while at the same time being regularly reminded that they're still viewed by many as an underclass. It's seen through the eyes of Omar (Omar Malik) and his complicated relationship with old schoold friend Johnny (Jonny Fines, who seems pretty spot-on casting for a play about laundry, considering he's always struck me as looking literally very clean, but metaphorically a bit dirty.)

Stage-to-screen review:Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual

More online theatre is being announced all the time to fill in the gap left by the buildings being shut, with the majority of what's coming up being shows I've already seen in person and reviewed. But that mainly applies to London and Stratford-upon-Avon, and the regional theatres I don't generally get to have been releasing material as well. In return for a donation, Leicester Curve are offering a recording of their 2018 show Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual for a week - this is an archive recording that was never intended for public release, but I guess even those have moved on in quality over the years, and instead of a static shot this is a perfectly watchable recording done with multiple moving cameras. Riaz Khan's original book was a response to the resurgence of racism on the football terraces in the noughties, through the lens of him finding an identity in the eighties in the unlikely family of the much-derided gangs of violent football hooligans known as casuals.

Theatre review: Henry VI (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

The Globe's announcement that last winter's Richard II was the start of the complete Henriad cycle being performed on their stages this year was something to get excited about but also came with the inevitable problem for the company: The first tetralogy is full of popular hits but while the second ends on another crowd-pleaser in Richard III, the three Henry VI plays that precede it are a much harder sell. Peter Hall and John Barton's Wars of the Roses trilogy compressed them into two plays, and as it turns out the Globe Ensemble's way around the issue is even more drastic, chopping and changing them into a single three-and-a-half hour epic. In reality, and entirely unsurprisingly, if there is such a thing as a massive fan of Part One they should probably not get their hopes up - the fact that King Henry (Jonathan Broadbent) is already old enough to walk and talk as the play begins should be a clue that the largely unrelated prequel wouldn't figure, and we open with the introduction of the figure who will haunt the whole second tet, his queen Margaret (Steffan Donnelly.)

Theatre review: The End of History...

Ten years ago Jack Thorne set an entire play in the wee small hours of the 2nd May 1997, and with his latest play's opening scene taking place about six months after that date it's clear he's not yet done interrogating what the hope and optimism of Tony Blair's first victory actually ever amounted to. Blair is much more of a background noise than a central theme in The End of History..., a family drama spanning twenty years that often has the feel of a sitcom that's gone unusually dark. Sal (Future Dame Lesley Sharp) and David (David Morrissey) are a kind of embarrassing sitcom mum and dad (right down to the clichéd trope of the mum who's a terrible cook,) with the main source of embarrassment being their commitment to their left-wing beliefs and causes, their enthusiasm for which has never dulled.