Theatre review: Paranormal Activity

It's technically not a seasonal show, but you could argue my last live theatre trip of 2025 is very much a traditional one, since ghost stories have long been associated with Christmas (and there is a Christmas tree on stage as the story is set in December.) Writer Levi Holloway and director Felix Barrett bring the Paranormal Activity horror movie franchise to the stage with an original story about a recently-married couple moving into a new home, but it soon becomes apparent this isn't going to be a story about a haunted house, but a haunting they've brought to it: Jimmy (Patrick Heusinger) has accepted a high-paying job in London, in part because it's a long way from Chicago, where his wife Lou (Melissa James) experienced blackouts, sleepwalking and depression, which she attributed to a "shadow" that's followed her since a traumatic childhood event.

Theatre review: Coriolanus (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Season director Angus Jackson returns for the fourth and last of the RSC's Roman plays, and although Coriolanus is set earlier than the other three, designer Robert Innes Hopkins eschews the togas of the middle two plays, to match the modern dress of Titus Andronicus. In fact this also starts with a rioting gang in hoodies, and since it will actually play first when they all transfer to London, it annoyed me a bit that it'll look there like Blanche McIntyre copied the idea. Fortunately there was less to annoy me about the rest of the production, in which Sope Dirisu takes on the least likeable of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Caius Martius, later given the title Coriolanus after one of his many military victories, is a one-man Roman army, raised as such by his batshit bloodthirsty mother Volumnia (Haydn Gwynne.)