Radio review: Elizabeth and Essex

A few words about an odd little (but in some ways huge and epic) audio drama, written by Robin Brooks as an original Radio 3 play but feeling like it has a strong theatrical connection in the sense that I can imagine Simon Russell Beale was probably going to find a way to play Elizabeth I sooner or later. Although technically in Elizabeth and Essex he's playing the writer and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, whose writings the play is based on, and reveal him as a drama queen imagining himself as the Virgin Queen while writing his book about her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Strachey has recently become besotted with Roger (Harry Lloyd,) a much younger man who's star-struck by the writer and becomes hugely fond of him, but clearly doesn't feel anywhere near as strongly about him as the older man does, and who is gradually drawn away from Strachey as he falls for fellow Bloomsbury Group member, the economist John Maynard Keynes (Julian Harries.)

Theatre review: Notes from Underground

I'd never been to the original location of The Print Room, a theatre in Notting Hill that had been steadily gaining a strong reputation, but it's now taken on ambitious new premises in what used to be the Coronet Cinema. There's still clearly a lot of development to be done (and I'm not sure the dolls hanging from the toilet doors make it look any less haunted than it already does) but they've already launched a debut season in a studio space. First up, Harry Lloyd and director Gérald Garutti adapt Dostoyevsky's existential novella Notes from Underground into a monologue for Lloyd to perform, and as we enter the space we find him wrapped in a blanket on a stage made out of old hardbacks. Silent and wild-eyed, he gestures to the audience to take a seat, and today seemed quite pained by the fact that one in the front row remained unoccupied until the last minute.

Stage-to-screen review: Henry IV Part 1 (BBC Hollow Crown)

Turns out becoming King of England will really age you, but on the plus side it'll restore your hairline: Henry IV regenerates from Rory Kinnear in the first part of the BBC's Hollow Crown quartet of Shakespeare Histories, to Jeremy Irons in Henry IV Part 1. Richard Eyre takes over directing duties for the middle two plays, and brings much more washed-out colours to reflect a more sombre reign than Richard II's. Haunted by the fact that he deposed a king and could face the same fate, Henry faces rebellion from Harry Percy (known as Hotspur) egged on by his uncle Worcester. Meanwhile Henry's son Hal (Tom Hiddleston) appears to be a very unworthy heir to the throne, spending all his time with the drunken old knight Falstaff and an assortment of misfits in an Eastcheap tavern.

Theatre review: The Duchess of Malfi

The Old Vic's baroque Duchess of Malfi is clearly not going to be the venue for another wedding disco, thus bucking the trend for Jacobean tragedy this year. Of course, the wedding in question being a closely-guarded secret (a secret that somehow survives several years and three children) the chances of the cast doing the "Tragedy" dance were always going to be slim. Instead Jamie Lloyd gives us an epic production of John Webster's best-known work, on Soutra Gilmour's sumptuous set of arches, walkways and candles. The Duchess of Malfi has recently been widowed, and her two brothers advise her not to remarry. Obeying them on the surface, she in fact secretly marries her young steward. When it all finally comes out, her brothers deal with the class-defying relationship in typically bloody fashion.