Theatre review: Wild

Mike Bartlett’s latest play doesn't mention Edward Snowden, but it makes no attempt to disguise its inspiration: Wild opens with American IT expert Andrew Wild (Jack Farthing) hiding in a Moscow hotel room, a couple of days after leaking a huge amount of data online, revealing the true extent to which the US Government spies on its own citizens and those of its allies. Miriam Buether's proscenium arch set is a pretty narrow letterbox - not always great for sightlines from the back, it has to be said - through which we see all that Andrew's world has currently shrunk down to. He's made a lot of powerful enemies overnight and has had to sequester himself without a phone or laptop to stop them tracking him down. Hopefully on his side is an organisation that's unnamed, but which can again be easily identified - it's reminiscent of WikiLeaks - and which has put him up in this safe room.

Theatre review: Carmen Disruption

The Almeida's "gold" season looking, directly or tangentially, at money, comes to a close with the UK debut of a Simon Stephens play originally commissioned and performed in Germany, where he's a big name. The audience in the stalls enters Carmen Disruption through the backstage area, the better to see Sharon Small in her dressing room as The Singer, an opera star who's travelled the world for years, singing the title role in Bizet's Carmen in different productions, in different opera houses. It's been her life for so long that her own identity has started to blur into the character, and when she arrives in the latest, unnamed European city, she starts to pick out archetypes from the story in the people she passes in the street: Carmen (Jack Farthing) becomes a beautiful, damaged rent boy, whose good looks are irresistible to all (at least they are in his own head.)