Theatre review: Accidental Death of an Anarchist

The Italian satirist Dario Fo is considered one of the great playwrights of the twentieth century, but his work is very rarely seen in London. The new version of Fo and Franca Rame's most famous work, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, both makes it seem incredible that their names aren't better-known, and at the same time provides an explanation for why they're rarely on our stages: Making their stuff work as well as it does here is a Herculean feat that could easily go very wrong. The latest transfer to suggest Robert Hastie's Sheffield Theatres is the venue to watch at the moment, Tom Basden's adaptation takes the 1970 play about police brutality and gives it a painfully up-to-date relocation to the present-day Metropolitan Police, with barely a real-life scandal or damning statistic left unmentioned. Daniel Rigby plays The Maniac, a compulsive liar who takes the quote "All the world's a stage" literally - he believes he's got a permanent audience.

Theatre review: Botticelli in the Fire

Roxana Silbert must be planning on giving her new theatre’s regulars a bit of a fright if her second main-stage show is anything to go by – you don’t know what silence sounds like until you’ve heard a Hampstead audience’s reaction to a comedy cunnilingus scene. Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli is best known for his “Birth of Venus” but his private life seems to have been full of mystery and contradictions: There are reports of him having been promiscuously gay as well as, in later life, having been a devoted follower of homophobic, fire-and-brimstone preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Both his sexuality and the extent of his religious conversion are disputed, however, and for his fictionalised biography Botticelli in the Fire Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill takes both stories to be true; in what Botticelli himself (Dickie Beau) introduces as the story of his downfall, we see what might have led him from poster child for Renaissance excess to allegedly burning many of his own paintings in the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities.

Theatre review: The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare's Globe)

Time for the second “Emilia” play in the Globe’s summer season, although as the Emilia (Zora Bishop) in The Winter’s Tale is a lady-in-waiting with few lines it’s not the strongest argument for the name’s significance to Shakespeare. The story really revolves around Leontes (Will Keen,) the Sicilian king and slipper enthusiast who’s been best friends with Bohemian king Polixenes (Oliver Ryan) all his life. But a sudden bout of jealous insanity convinces him that Polixenes is having an affair with his wife Hermione (Priyanga Burford,) and nothing will shake him of that conviction. Courtier Camillo (Adrian Bower) manages to convince the visiting king that his friend is plotting to kill him, and they escape back to Bohemia, but the heavily pregnant Hermione isn’t so lucky: Publicly accused of cheating, she’s thrown into jail, put on show-trial and even the literal word of god (a judgement from the Delphic oracle) can’t convince her husband of her innocence.

Theatre review: Oslo

Getting a quick transfer from a hit Broadway run to the West End, J.T. Rogers’ Oslo first spends a couple of weeks at the Lyttelton; Bartlett Sher’s production gets an all-new British cast to tell the behind-the-scenes story of historic Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It’s the early 1990s and Middle East peace talks are dominated by the Americans, who insist on a negotiating style that puts all demands on the table – it’s never yielded results, and attacks continue from both sides. Norwegian sociologist Terje Rød-Larsen (Toby Stephens) believes he’s come up with a better model, based around smaller groups of negotiators getting to know each other as people, and chipping away slowly at concessions. Terje’s wife Mona Juul (Lydia Leonard) works at the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and helps set up a back-channel between senior Israelis and PLO members, behind the Americans’ backs.

Theatre review: German Skerries

Time for another round of Robert Holman roulette: For a hugely influential playwright* he has one of the most understated styles imaginable. It means I don't like to miss his plays because on the right day they can be gently, powerfully moving; but it feels risky because on the wrong one you get something like the notoriously dull Making Noise Quietly. But I was also interested to see German Skerries if only because the Bush Theatre uses the script to wallpaper the urinals in the gents', so if nothing else I was familiar with the title. The titular German Skerries are a treacherous collection of rocks by the mouth of the River Tees, so named when a Luftwaffe pilot fell foul of them during World War II. By the late '70s when the play is set, they're mainly frequented by cormorants, so a nearby outcrop with a good view of the skerries is a popular spot for bird-watchers.

Theatre review: Jack and the Beanstalk (Lyric Hammersmith)

There's a new creative team behind the scenes for the Lyric Hammersmith's pantomime this year, but for the fourth year running it's Stevie Webb's job to hold things together on stage. Tom Wells takes over writing duties and Dan Herd directs Jack and the Beanstalk, in which Hammersmith is terrorised by the giant Nostril and his henchman Mr Fleshcreep (Nigel Richards,) and only a girl called Jack (Rochelle Rose) and her green-fingered best friend Sprout (Webb) can save the day by climbing up a beanstalk into the sky. And along the way of course there's songs, audience participation, double-entendres for the grown-ups, topical references (Zumba, Miley Cyrus and Mumford & Sons are popular targets) and very, very bad jokes.