Theatre review: Our Country's Good

After a few years away from its ubiquity about a decade ago, I'm going to guess Our Country's Good is back on the A'Level syllabus as it makes a return to the stage (and the school groups in the audience seemed very familiar with the play as well.) For Rachel O'Riordan's production at the Lyric Hammersmith Timberlake Wertenbaker has made some revisions to her most famous play, apparently to provide a more authentic voice to the speeches by the play's sole Australian First Nations character, who casts a detached, quizzical eye over the hordes of British men and women who've come off a fleet of ships. In addition to these text revisions, which I guess are the translations into Aboriginal dialect that pepper the speeches, instead of a man in traditional dress Killara (Naarah) is now a woman in modern clothes, witnessing the soldiers and convicts arriving in what will eventually become Sydney in the late 18th century.

Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost (RSC/RST)

I would rather see a show relatively early in its run, especially since I review them online and people could read my recommendations and decide what to see based on them (stop laughing at the back, I've been assured it happened once.) But sometimes between rail strikes and me being busy the rest of the run I end up in Stratford-upon-Avon for the final matinée, so you're reading this after the run's ended, sorry if you fancied it. And yes, speaking of fancying, the star name here is Luke Thompson, who for the last eleven years I've been watching on stage have his clothes fall off on the slightest pretext with such regularity it can't all just be down to thirsty directors, he's got to be initiating some of it himself. In an unrelated matter, the show that's now given him above-the-title star status is Bridgerton. In any case, it's also always interesting to see what a new regime at one of the major theatres has chosen as its opening production.

Theatre review: Othello (National Theatre / Lyttelton)

Othello must be one of the most-frequently performed Shakespeare plays at the National Theatre, and the latest production by Deputy Artistic Director Clint Dyer - the first at the venue by a black director - is in part inspired by how long the version with Laurence Olivier in blackface continued to hold pride of place in the archive. That's one of the photos that adorn the back wall of the stage as the audience enters the Lyttelton, among an ever-changing projection display of past production posters that suggests the different approaches to the play taken over the years. As the display ticks past the years since it was written, we get the idea that we've reached a very 2022 reading, which strips the play back to show its racial conflicts as the primary motivator. Here, only Giles Terrera's General Othello isn't white; almost everyone in the rest of the cast doubles as a member of a sinister, black-shirted chorus Dyer has christened the System.