Theatre review: Shaw Shorts

If you don't count a couple of false starts in autumn 2020, there's a nice symmetry to my first theatre trip after the third lockdown being to the Orange Tree, where I also saw my last show before the first lockdown. Let's hope it's a good omen for this reopening being the one that sticks and marks the start of things going back to normal. It is just a start though, and for now most venues are taking baby steps: For Paul Miller that means a return to one of his theatre's signature playwrights, Bernard Shaw, in intimate mode - Miller directs a double bill of short one-act comedies about marriage, extra-marital affairs and the adherence to social expectations that stops couples from making the choices that might actually mean happy lives for them. They can be booked separately but they really are very brief, and since they're very close thematically it makes sense to see them in the double bill they're calling Shaw Shorts (I mean "Shawts" was right there but I guess after the last 14 months everyone's too tired for shenanigans.)

Theatre review: The Welkin

After adapting Chimerica for TV Lucy Kirkwood returns to the stage for a play that feels equally epic in ambition, even if instead of spanning continents this one is largely set in a single room. It does have its thoughts on the stars though, as The Welkin takes place in Suffolk in 1759, the year in which Edmond Halley had predicted the comet that would eventually bear his name would appear. It's a scientific discovery that's captured the imagination of people even in remote, small towns like this one, with everyone regularly mentioning it, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the celestial body. But if human knowledge is expanding to include the heavens, women like midwife Lizzy Luke (Maxine Peake) find that progress closer to home is much slower than they would like. Summoned grudgingly away from her laundry, Lizzy's expertise has had her requested by a local judge to take part in one of the few areas of Georgian law left to the judgement of women.

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 Treatment

The latest Almeida season opens with Martin Crimp's 1993 play The Treatment - "treatment" as in the summary of a movie pitch, as well as the way people treat each other. Anne (Aisling Loftus) is describing a difficult life, culminating in her marriage: Kept in a small apartment she never leaves, her husband would sometimes tie and gag her, not to abuse her physically but to give lengthy speeches, waxing lyrical about car parks and strip lights. She's telling her story to Jennifer (Indira Varma) and Andrew (Julian Ovenden,) married as well as being producing partners, and interested in developing her story. They bring in down-and-out playwright Clifford (Ian Gelder) to script it, and bombastic actor John (Gary Beadle) to play the husband, as well as to provide some star wattage that'll attract investors.

Theatre review: Oresteia (Almeida Theatre)

Freud used characters from Greek tragedy as archetypes and now Robert Icke reverses the process, turning Aeschylus' Oresteia into a complex psychological study of Orestes - his actions, the contradictory aspects of his personality, and above all the unreliability of his memories. And that's only one of the ways Icke rewrites the rulebook in his glorious headfuck of a production, which it seems ridiculous to even attempt a short review of: By the second interval I already thought I could write an essay about it. It's unlikely a recording of it will be commercially released but I hope it's at least easily available to students, as it could be good fodder for dissertations for years to come. The story, at least, is the same one it always was: To help him win a war, Agamemnon (Angus Wright) sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. On his return, his wife Klytemnestra (Lia Williams) murders him in revenge.

Theatre review: 1984

Headlong's latest tour, and the last to be programmed by Rupert Goold, sees Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan attempt to bring George Orwell's 1984 to the stage. The most famous dystopian novel and one whose key phrases have entered the language (and inspired a couple of TV shows that were probably not... quite what Orwell had in mind,) it creates a very specific alternate universe that might have been hard to bring to life. The way they've done it is not to try and expand out into Big Brother's world, but to focus right into the mind of Winston Smith, to the point that what's real and what's in his head blurs - just as his eventual torturers want, of course. In a world where the Government controls everything people say and tries to control what they think too, Winston (Mark Arends) has rebellious thoughts. When he meets Julia (Hara Yannas) and falls in love, his thoughts spill out into action, but Big Brother is always watching.

Theatre review: Mare Rider

After several failed attempts to have a baby, Selma (Anna Francolini) has had a difficult birth, and is now recovering in Homerton Hospital in Hackney. Spending much of her time asleep or sedated, her dreams are invaded by a nightmare figure from Turkish mythology, Elka the Mare Rider (Kathryn Hunter.) Elka is a millennia-old woman who haunts new mothers if they're not constantly attended, eventually taking the baby's life or - in exceptional circumstances - the mother can bargain with her to take her own. In Mare Rider Leyla Nazli brings a modern woman who's left it quite late to try for a baby, face to face with an ancient creature who doesn't think that much has changed for women since the days her legend was born.

Theatre review: The House of Bernarda Alba

I do like to pick something spectacularly unromantic for my Valentine's Day viewing. I'm not sure anything can beat The Shape of Things last year, but The House of Bernarda Alba, the classic of violently repressed sexuality, fits the bill well enough. Bijan Sheibani has moved the action of Lorca's play to a remote part of Iran, possibly in the present day - in any case we see the maid vacuuming early on, so we know it can't be too far in the past. I know no more about Muslim mourning rituals than I do about the original's Catholic ones, but for me at least this contemporary setting worked well enough, and makes the play a reminder that oppression of women isn't exclusively a thing of the past. Bernarda Alba (most of the other characters have had their names changed to something more suitably Iranian but the matriarch's stays the same) has just buried her second husband, and commands her household of five daughters to observe 8 years of mourning which will see them imprisoned in their own home. The only hope of escape is a suitable marriage (and wealthy landowner Bernarda's definition of "suitable" is cripplingly narrow in their small, mostly-poor village.) Oldest daughter by her first husband, Asieh (Pandora Colin) has her own fortune, which has caught the eye of an eligible young local. But everyone except the matriarch can see his real interest is in youngest, prettiest daughter Adela (Hara Yannas.) The hunchbacked Elmira (Amanda Hale) is also hopelessly in love with him, and if she can't have him she'll try and make sure nobody does.