Theatre review:When Winston Went to War With the Wireless

There's a tendency for previously obscure ideas or stories to get multiple interpretations all at once. Sometimes the coincidence just seems random, at others there's an obvious logic to it: You can see why events of recent years might inspire multiple writers to look back at a historical event when a Conservative government attempted to control the output of the BBC. Six months ago I'd never heard of the feud between Winston Churchill and the BBC's first Director General, John Reith. Then earlier this year I listened to a radio drama about the subject, and within weeks it had been announced that Jack Thorne would be premiering his own take on the subject at the Donald and Margot Warehouse. Having been left with altogether too many W tiles, Thorne presents When Winston Went to War With the Wireless.

Theatre review: The Great British Bake Off Musical

Would you believe, my friend Ian says that sometimes he chooses what shows to come to with me because I've booked some camp old nonsense. The nerve! Anyway here's The Great British Bake Off Musical, a stage tribute to the international TV phenomenon best known for contestants who become instant best friends, technical challenges where the entire recipe reads "make a Latvian Backwards Cake," and a commitment to smutty double entendres that means nobody can make a blancmange without an accidentally-on-purpose pegging reference. The character names in Jake Brunger & Pippa Cleary's musical are made up, but the judges in particular make no disguise of who they're based on: Phil Hollinghurst (John Owen-Jones) is a silver-haired Scouse baker known for his blue eyes, bad jokes and dishing out handshakes as if they have inherent value. Pam Lee (Haydn Gwynne) is a Dame fond of statement necklaces, colourful glasses and desserts that are 90% booze.

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: The Way of the World

A delayed trip to the Donald and Margot Warehouse, where James Macdonald's production of The Way of the World has been sadly overshadowed by the reason the performance I was originally due to see was cancelled: Actor Alex Beckett's unexpected death. Performances of William Congreve's Restoration comedy have now resumed with Robin Pearce replacing Beckett as Waitwell, and the rest of the run being dedicated to the late actor's memory. Unfortunately it proves a pretty poor memorial, as Macdonald has produced an interminable, impenetrable and woefully unfunny evening whose cast try hard to inject some energy into it but only succeed in small doses. I don't think I've seen Congreve's play before but I suspect it has to take a lot of the blame itself; the lengthy first scene in which Mirabel (Geoffrey Streatfeild) and Fainall (Tom Mison) exchange exposition about numerous similarly-named characters we haven't met yet sets a lugubrious tone the rest of the play struggles to get out of, and left me none the wiser about who anyone was by the time they turned up.

Theatre review: Coriolanus (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Season director Angus Jackson returns for the fourth and last of the RSC's Roman plays, and although Coriolanus is set earlier than the other three, designer Robert Innes Hopkins eschews the togas of the middle two plays, to match the modern dress of Titus Andronicus. In fact this also starts with a rioting gang in hoodies, and since it will actually play first when they all transfer to London, it annoyed me a bit that it'll look there like Blanche McIntyre copied the idea. Fortunately there was less to annoy me about the rest of the production, in which Sope Dirisu takes on the least likeable of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Caius Martius, later given the title Coriolanus after one of his many military victories, is a one-man Roman army, raised as such by his batshit bloodthirsty mother Volumnia (Haydn Gwynne.)

Theatre review: The Threepenny Opera

Prepare for shares in eyeliner to soar as Rufus Norris brings Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's satirical musical The Threepenny Opera to the Olivier with a new translation of the book and lyrics by Simon Stephens, and Rory Kinnear at the head of a real luxury cast. Mack the Knife (Kinnear) is a violent East End criminal, who's managed to avoid punishment so far through a combination of Chief Inspector Tiger Brown (Peter De Jersey) being an old army buddy of his, and the fact that Mack has an incriminating dossier that could cause the new King of England some embarrassment. But his downfall might well come not from his crimes but from his marriage: His new wife is the seemingly timid accountant Polly (Rosalie Craig,) who he hopes can use her organisational skills to help build his criminal empire up.

Theatre review: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

When I first saw Pedro Almodóvar’s film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown I remember being struck by how overtly theatrical it looked, and how well it would work if put on the stage. But Almodóvar is reluctant to license stage adaptations of his work, and as the film finally comes to the theatre it's in the form of an off-Broadway musical with book by Jeffrey Lane and songs by David Yazbek. Pepa (Tamsin Greig) is an actress most of whose work is in TV commercials, and in dubbing foreign film into Spanish, usually opposite her boyfriend Iván (Jérôme Pradon.) One morning she wakes up to find Iván has dumped her via answerphone message, and suddenly there's a lot she didn't know about him, like the estranged wife Lucia (Haydn Gwynne) who's been in a mental hospital for the last 19 years, and doesn't come across as massively sane even now she's been released.

Theatre review: The Audience

Possibly inspired by her own initials, Helen Mirren has carved out a niche for herself playing Queens of England, particularly the current one. Peter Morgan's award-winning film The Queen focused in part on her relationship with Tony Blair, through the weekly audiences the monarch holds with the Prime Minister. This is what Morgan expands on in his new stage play - leaving Blair himself behind, he looks at eight of the other people to have held the post during the Queen's reign, and how she might have got on with them during The Audience. Mirren reprises her role as well-known stamp model Elizabeth Windsor, and a high-profile cast join her as the procession of PMs in what are, of course, encounters completely imagined by Morgan - exactly what is really discussed at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday evenings remains strictly confidential.