Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

It's great to see Jade Williams back at the Globe, even if it is indoors in the Swanamaker so there's no groundlings for her to vomit on. She and Dharmesh Patel pair up to play Rosaline and Berowne, the proto-Beatrice and Benedick who appear as one of the central three romantic couples in Love's Labour's Lost. That's right, three; Nick Bagnall's production, although not, to my knowledge, touring, has the kind of cast-size you'd expect of a "tiny" touring production, with eight actors covering all the roles. A cerain amount of editing is needed to make that work, and in this case Longueville and Maria have been edited right out of the play altogether. What's left is the story of the King of Navarre (Paul Stocker,) who talks his friends Berowne and Dumaine (Tom Kanji) into joining him in a puritanically strict three-year course of study that includes swearing off the company of women.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - The Seagull

Last year's big one-day, three-play marathon, The Wars of the Roses, followed Shakespeare's rarely-performed Henry VI plays with the much-loved and frequently revived Richard III. So too this year when it's Anton Chekhov's turn, and after the very obscure Platonov and fairly rare Ivanov, Young Chekhov at the National takes us up to his first big hit, and my personal favourite, The Seagull, in the same theatre where I first saw the play. Tom Pye's set for the whole trilogy has, as far as possible, avoided the usual stuffy drawing rooms and, taking it's cue from Chekhov's love of a disappearing natural world, been dominated by dead trees and shallow waters. This water has colonised even more of the stage for the finale, with all of the upstage area now a lake, through which characters sometimes wade to make a dramatic entrance.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - Platonov

Another theatrical marathon day as a trio of productions originally seen in Chichester come to the Olivier. Jonathan Kent directs David Hare translations of Anton Chekhov's early work, grouped together and played either individually or in one day as Young Chekhov. First up is the playwright's first, unfinished full-length play Platonov, in which a rural community deal with twin obsessions of sex and money - too much of one and not enough of the other. Cash is thin on the ground for the upper-class widow Anna Petrovna (Nina Sosanya,) who's running her late husband's estate entirely on loans from local loan shark Shcherbuk (David Verey,) but she's still a young woman and the wealthy Porfiri (Jonathan Coy) has proposed. But Anna only has eyes for the same man all the other local women do.

Theatre review: The Father (Tricycle Theatre)

André (Kenneth Cranham) has lived in his Paris flat for decades, but after he's scared off a number of carers his daughter Anne (Claire Skinner) is worried he won't be able to live alone there much longer. She's planning to move to London with boyfriend Pierre (Colin Tierney,) and sending her father to a care home might be the best option. Or maybe she should move André in with them, and get a new carer, Laura (Jade Williams) to look after him during the day? In fact, maybe this has already happened? Florian Zeller's play The Father, which arrives at the Tricycle in a translation by Christopher Hampton and production by James Macdonald first seen in Bath, is a rather extraordinary look at ageing and dementia, that takes us through the story of Anne being increasingly unable to recognise the sometimes charming, sometimes cruel man her father has become. But unlike other takes on the subject, Zeller attempts to give the audience an idea of what the story seems like from inside André's head.

Theatre review: Platonov: Sons Without Fathers

The play usually titled Platonov is a bit of a Chekhov curiosity: A six-hour early play never performed in his lifetime, it was discovered locked away after the playwright's death and has been the subject of various attempts to rework it into something less unwieldy. Helena Kaut-Howson's version, titled Sons Without Fathers, focuses on the title character and the other younger figures in the story. Misha Platonov (Jack Laskey, The Bastard Love-Child of David Tennant And Daniel Radcliffe) is the 30-year-old schoolteacher in a remote Russian village. His youthful optimism gone, he's now the poster-boy for a disaffected generation - in Kaut-Howson's modernised production they find themselves a couple of decades after the fall of communism without a new ideal to replace it. Misha's search for a new meaning for his life leads, inevitably, to disaster.

Theatre review: In Basildon

You couldn't accuse David Eldridge of shying away from the darker side of life. After last year's children's-TV-presenter-gets-heroin-habit fun and games at the Almeida, he returns to the Royal Court and a reconfigured Downstairs theatre where Len (Phil Cornwell) is on his deathbed with prostate cancer, in his living room In Basildon. The scene is set for a dysfunctional family reunion as Len's sister Doreen (Linda Bassett) has been living in his house for decades, but she's not spoken to younger sister Maureen (Ruth Sheen) for the last 20 years. Though the details are sketchy at first, it's clear money and ownership of the house are at the root of the family feud. Doreen's son Barry (Lee Ross) and Maureen's daughter Shelley (Jade Williams, briefly allowed out of the Globe and not even required to vomit on anyone) try their best not to let the hard feelings carry on to their generation. Once Len is dead, things don't get any easier as it turns out he's recently changed his will, and the new arrangements could leave everyone in very different circumstances than they expected.