Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

A couple of years ago Holly Race Roughan directed a Henry V in the Swanamaker that impressively reinvented the bombastic history play as a chilling tragedy, so I was willing to give her return to the venue a chance, despite it being advertised as the hoariest of all Shakespearean clichés - and the one every director who's ever tackled the play seems convinced they're the first ever to spot: The dark underside of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Co-directed by Naeem Hayat, this is the story of an Athens ruled by Michael Marcus' drunken bully Theseus, who's forcing the defeated Amazon queen to marry him; at the start, he and Hippolyta (Hedydd Dylan) are still trying to kill each other as they plan their wedding. When a young woman, Hermia (Tiwa Lade) petitions Theseus to be allowed to marry the man she loves, she's instead given an ultimatum to accept her father's choice, or be executed.

Theatre review: The New Real

My relationship with David Edgar's plays has been mixed: I think my still-strong memories of enjoying Pentecost in the '90s make me always want to give his new work a try, but the RSC's most-commissioned modern writer was also responsible for the notoriously dreary Written on the Heart, and after last week's meh Here In America I felt a bit of trepidation towards the second of his premieres this autumn. The New Real is also described by the blurb as both "epic" and "panoramic," so they're really making sure you know it's going to be long. Still, my first show at Stratford's The Other Place since it was serving as The Courtyard twelve years ago turns out to be flawed, but worth checking out. Edgar returns to Eastern Europe and an unnamed former Soviet state, in a story spanning the last 22 years and looking at the question that has been worrying many political playwrights: How did politics move so far to the Right and so far from reality in that time?

Theatre review: Henry V (Headlong)

This year's second London Henry V is a radically different beast than the Donmar's bombastic war epic, and different in fact from any I've seen before in 30 or so years of Shakespeare productions. The clichéd view of the play is of a jingoistic celebration of Englishness, but in the last two decades it's been rare to see it through anything other than a cynical eye as a story of British imperialism, and increasingly through the prism of an arrogant attitude towards Europe. Holly Race Roughan's production for Headlong, which opens at the Swanamaker before transferring to Leeds and Northampton next year, takes it right out of the canon of Shakespeare's Histories, reimagining it entirely as a brooding and claustrophobic Tragedy. And if I was less excited than some about Kit "Christopher" Harington's casting earlier this year, Big Favourite Round These Parts Oliver Johnstone getting his chance at one of the big Shakespearean leads is more the kind of thing to grab my attention.

Theatre review: Metamorphoses

With the last few outdoor shows at Shakespeare's Globe still running, the summer season concludes by taking us back inside the Swanamaker for the delayed end result of the new Scriptorium project: Billed as the first time the Globe has had a team of writers-in-residence in 400 years, the first year of the project culminated in the team of Sami Ibrahim, Laura Lomas and Sabrina Mahfouz collaborating on a play that, appropriately enough, mixes the old with the new. The stories are almost as old as they get, with a collection of Greco-Roman mythology as collected by Ovid in his Metamorphoses; the storytelling style, treating the stories with a mix of respect and irreverence, is both fresh and well-suited to the intimate space. Sean Holmes and Holly Race Roughan direct a cast of four - Steffan Donnelly, Fiona Hampton, Charlie Josephine and Irfan Shamji - who tell some of the best-known, as well as some of the more obscure myths, especially those, as the title suggests, that feature their lead characters going through a magical transformation.

Theatre review: Eye of a Needle

This August has been a decent month for gay-themed theatre, and it's rounded off at Southwark Playhouse by Eye of a Needle, a dark comedy about asylum-seekers. Chris MacDonald's story makes points that could apply to people fleeing a number of dangers, but it focuses particularly on those seeking safety from countries where gay people are persecuted. Laurence (Nic Jackman) works at UK Immigration Control, assessing cases for entry to the UK, but with a barely-concealed directive from above that as many as possible be refused. With the sometimes manipulative intervention of his boss Ted (Stephen Hudson,) we see him deal with frightened Jamaican Harrison (Ekow Quartey,) but the person who really gets his attention is Natale (Ony Uhiara.) A vocal gay rights campaigner from Uganda and targeted by the press, her no-nonsense arguments and fearless comebacks make him pay attention to the persecution he deals with daily, in a way he hasn't before - and she's not above taking advantage of his obvious attraction to her.