Theatre review: Edward II

After half the RSC Artistic Director made her debut in the role last summer, the other half also opts to do so in the Swan - although after mostly directing for the last couple of decades, Daniel Evans returns to acting in the company where he first launched his career. Christopher Marlowe's Edward II begins with the funeral of Edward I, and Daniel Raggett's production has the Stalls audience file respectfully past the old king's coffin lying in state before the new King Edward II (Evans) is crowned. But even before the funeral is over Edward is busy reversing one of his father's decrees: The banishment of Gaveston (Eloka Ivo,) his closest friend and lover. Not only does he immediately bring Gaveston back, he showers him with honours and positions of power (to such a ridiculous extent there's even a Mitchell & Webb sketch making fun of it,) and the assembled barons aren't happy about it.

Theatre review: Quiz

My policy on making theatre trips to Chichester changed from "never" to "three times this year" in part thanks to each of the three shows feeling like they completed some kind of set: The decider was the chance to bookend a decade with different Ian McKellen performances of King Lear, but Sweet Bird of Youth made for a double bill of Tennesse Williams plays starring Brian J. Smith, and now the final show in Daniel Evans' first season in charge concludes a trio of new James Graham plays in 2017. Quiz is less obviously political than most of Graham's plays but you don't have to scratch too deep to find some of the wider themes that often come up in the playwright's work, particularly Privacy, about transparency in personal life, politics and the law; and whether the tendency towards leaving nothing secret in the name of full disclosure is in fact harming the chance of fair treatment behind closed doors. The reason this comes up is that Graham's creating a fictionalised version of a legal case considered to have become trial by media.

Theatre review: Pitcairn

In his most recent play Great Britain a couple of months ago, Richard Bean gave the Queen a line about "looking forward to our visit to the Pitcairn islands." So Bean's critics can add product placement to his list of crimes as Pitcairn is in fact the title of his next project, a production from Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint with Shakespeare's Globe, where it lands as part of its tour. The last war play in the Globe's 2014 season comes with the depressing message that a civil war can break out even in a nation that consists of a couple of dozen people. These are the former mutineers of the Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian (Tom Morely,) who after stopping off in Tahiti to pick up wives and convince a couple of local men to join them as well, have sailed to the uninhabited island of Pitcairn, where they hope to build a Utopian society - and hide from the Royal Navy who'd quite like to hang them all.

Theatre review: Straight

There's a definite kinky theme developing to this week's theatregoing (how traumatic for me, I'm sure you're all thinking, given the famously prim and proper nature of my reviews.) After last night's definitely-not-gay shenanigans, tonight a play that takes a look at what it means to be Straight, by taking the very notion to its extreme. DC Moore has shown an ability to write not only powerful but quite varied plays with the likes of The Empire, Honest and The Swan (varied, but if they can be set in/actually take place in a pub, so much the better it seems.) This time he's taken as his inspiration a fairly recent film, Lynn Shelton's Humpday, to look at the platonic relationship between straight male friends, and in the process use it as a prism to look at men and women's relationships as well.

Theatre review: The Master and Margarita

I was a rare voice of dissent among the praise for Complicite's A Disappearing Number, so wasn't sure if I fancied the company's latest venture, The Master and Margarita. But with the excellent Sinéad Matthews in one of the title roles, and Big Favourite Round These Parts Henry Pettigrew in the ensemble, I decided to give it a chance. Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical novel about the Devil visiting Soviet-era Moscow is apparently famously impenetrable (I haven't read it myself) and so it is with Simon McBurney's stage adaptation. Its Möbius plot encompasses two writers, both inspired to write identical stories that are essentially the Gospel According to Pontius Pilate, only for both to have them rejected by the authorities for their suggestion that Jesus/Yeshua actually existed. There's also a demonic variety show, a ball attended by history's most notorious killers, and the titular doomed affair.