Theatre review: Hedda

Tanika Gupta throws Ibsen's proto-sociopath Hedda Gabler into a blender with the real-life story of silent screen star Merle Oberon, an Anglo-Indian woman who passed for white to make it in Hollywood, not being found out until after her death. In Hedda the title character is the daughter of a British General during the Raj and his Indian servant, who's bought her way out of a studio contract at great expense after becoming fed up with their control over her. In 1948 the War is over and India has been partitioned and given independence, and Hedda (Pearl Chanda) has just married her third (or possibly fourth) husband George Tesman (Joe Bannister,) a minor film director who's had to go into significant debt to keep his glamorous new wife in the style she's become accustomed to. This includes employing Rina Fatania's Shona, the maid who's been with Hedda all her life because she is, of course, actually her mother.

Theatre review: Cymbeline (RSC / RST)

What better way to mark the Coronation than with Shakespeare's late romance about a forgettable king with a dead first wife and a panto villain second wife? The last time the RSC staged Cymbeline they gender-swapped the King and Queen to avoid the cliché of the wicked stepmother. For Gregory Doran's final show as Artistic Director things stay very much as written, because that particular cliché - and the play's extended collection of weird bad guys in general - feed into the production's feel of a dark fairytale. Peter De Jersey plays Cymbeline, the King of Britain who gets all but written out of his own play when he starts to fall ill, suspiciously soon after the new Queen starts brewing him a mysterious health tonic. Alexandra Gilbreath goes full Cruella as the Queen who also advises that the princess Imogen marry her son Cloten (Conor Glean,) so he can inherit the throne should the King suddenly die for some reason.

Theatre review: The Hotel Plays

Three Tennessee Williams vignettes come together to form an interesting promenade show from Defibrillator, a theatre company that's taken over three bedrooms and a function room of the Langham Hotel in central London to create The Hotel Plays. Small audience groups are led up and down stairs by an usher, and the stories linked by appearances from porter Charlie (Linden Walcott-Burton) as we witness intimate scenes from fracturing lives. The Langham is a pretty swanky hotel, but for Defibrillator's purposes its rooms represent places that probably aren't quite as posh, and more likely to witness the kind of nefarious business we see in the short plays. Like the long-running affair in The Pink Bedroom, directed by Anthony Banks, where a Man (Gyuri Sarossy) arrives expecting another no-strings night with his mistress. But the Woman (Helen George) is starting to want something a bit more from the relationship - something like respect.