Theatre review: King Lear (Shakespeare's Globe)

Female King Lears have become a bit more common in recent years, but Kathryn Hunter's 1997 performance of the role is generally referred to as the first-ever professional production with a woman in the lead. Presumably it was also remarkable for her age, as she would have been younger then than I am now, and much as I grumble about getting on a bit I'm not quite at the point of identifying with the dementia-stricken monarch just yet. This was long before I'd ever even heard of Hunter, now one of my favourite actors, so I was excited to have a chance to finally see her in the role, 25 years closer to the character's supposed age, at Shakespeare's Globe. But it's turned out to be a troubled production: Hunter was meant to reunite onstage for the second time this year with her husband Marcello Magni, but he had to drop out so we get a much younger Kent, with an appealing amount of swagger, in Gabriel Akuwudike.

Theatre review: Platonov: Sons Without Fathers

The play usually titled Platonov is a bit of a Chekhov curiosity: A six-hour early play never performed in his lifetime, it was discovered locked away after the playwright's death and has been the subject of various attempts to rework it into something less unwieldy. Helena Kaut-Howson's version, titled Sons Without Fathers, focuses on the title character and the other younger figures in the story. Misha Platonov (Jack Laskey, The Bastard Love-Child of David Tennant And Daniel Radcliffe) is the 30-year-old schoolteacher in a remote Russian village. His youthful optimism gone, he's now the poster-boy for a disaffected generation - in Kaut-Howson's modernised production they find themselves a couple of decades after the fall of communism without a new ideal to replace it. Misha's search for a new meaning for his life leads, inevitably, to disaster.

Theatre review: A Tender Thing

Of all the former Ensemble^TM members who might have made a speedy return to the RSC, I would have put Kathryn Hunter at the bottom of the list after her very public resignation from both that season and her position as an RSC Associate. But return she has, and as she's one of those actors whose performances are always worth catching if at all possible, A Tender Thing saw me make a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon for a show that's not even as long as the train trip each way.

Apparently the question "what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet had lived and grown older" is one that continues to haunt writers and actors. (I don't know why, the answer is "they'd have broken up within a fortnight." Oh shush, you know they would.) Ben Power doesn't quite attempt to answer this question: Instead he creates a new Romeo and Juliet out of the original words of Shakespeare's play.