Theatre review: The Seagull

Hot on the heels of a Three Sisters that found a bit more humour than usual in one of the bleaker Chekhovs comes a Seagull that focuses on the melancholy of one of the ones that's officially a comedy. Duncan Macmillan and director Thomas Ostermeier's adaptation keeps all four acts in the al fresco location where only the first usually takes place: The lakeside dacha of retired civil servant Peter Sorin (Jason Watkins,) whose insistence that the fresh country air doesn't agree with him helps him and everyone else ignore just how bad his health actually is. Spending the summer there as usual is his sister Irina Arkádina (Cate Blanchett,) a famous actress, with her new boyfriend Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke,) a bestselling novelist. But we begin with Arkádina's son Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee,) an aspiring playwright who's premiering an experimental play he's convinced is the future of art.

Stage-to-screen review: Henry VI Part 2 (BBC Hollow Crown)

The cynical side of me thinks that the middle part of the BBC's Wars of the Roses wouldn't have focused quite so squarely on the future Richard III if they hadn't got Banoffee Hydrochloride to play him; but realistically I think Shakespeare's first tetralogy of English Histories is so roundly considered to be unloved that the one character everyone's heard of would probably have been at the center of Ben Power and Dominic Cooke's The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI Part 2, regardless of who they got to strap on the hunchback. In any case, making this mix of Shakespeare's Parts 2 and 3 effectively a prequel to Richard III lends it the closest thing it has to an overall story arc, in an adaptation that doesn't live up to the dramatic impetus Power and Cooke managed last week in Part 1.

Theatre review: The Twits

With two Roald Dahl adaptations still doing good business in the West End, the Royal Court might look like it's piggybacking its way to a family hit, but The Twits isn't quite like Matilda, and certainly not like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Like those shows, it has a somewhat surprising choice of playwright for the adaptation - Enda Walsh this time - but unlike those it can't rely on the audience's familiarity with the plot: The Twits is closer to a short story than a novella, so Dahl's original story is used up in about 15 minutes at the start and end of the stage version. In between, Walsh and director John Tiffany are free to make up their own new version of the story - perhaps that's why it's being promoted as a "mischievous adaptation" - which to me at least felt very much in the spirit of Dahl. Mr and Mrs Twit (Jason Watkins and Monica Dolan) are a horrible couple who hate bathing, children, other people in general, and most of all each other.

Theatre review: Strange Interlude

Strange indeed: I made sure to book a Sunday matinee of Strange Interlude, having heard that Eugene O'Neill's play is meant to run at five hours, and that the National were hoping to bring their production in at under four. As it turns out, Simon Godwin manages to get it down to a manageable but still hefty 3 and a quarter, but this epic family drama still struggles to justify the time it demands of the audience. The story follows Nina (Anne-Marie Duff,) devastated after the death of her fiancé Gordon in the First World War. Not having had the chance to consummate their relationship, her frustration manifests itself as sex with other wounded veterans. This stops when she's persuaded to marry the gormless Sam (Jason Watkins) whom she hopes to learn to love and raise children with. But this too will prove a problem when she discovers something about her new husband even he doesn't know: A family history of insanity that would almost certainly be passed on to his children.

Theatre review: Farewell to the Theatre

Melancholy is the overwhelming tone of Richard Nelson's new play Farewell to the Theatre, set among a group of English ex-pats in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1916. World War I rages but America hasn't joined yet and on a university campus, British experts are popular on the lecture circuit. Widow Dorothy (Jemma Redgrave) runs a guest house, and is in competition with her late husband's mistress over who can mourn him the longest. Her brother Henry (Louis Hilyer) is an English lecturer at the University, and neither of the siblings seem to be popular on campus. Beatrice (Tara Fitzgerald) is a married former actress having an affair with Charles (cute American actor William French in his professional stage debut,) the new president of the student drama society, while Jason Watkins' Frank is the cake-loving Dickens expert. The most recent arrival is Harley Granville-Barker (Ben Chaplin,) the actor, director, playwright and theorist whose ideas challenged theatrical tradition and who argued in favour of a National Theatre decades before it became a reality. Around this time in his life, Granville-Barker became disillusioned with theatre and eventually left it altogether; he also wrote a play called Farewell to the Theatre, from which this play gets its title, presumably in order to cause maximum confusion. It's also a bit misleading as it's not just Granville-Barker's crisis Nelson's play is concerned with.