Theatre review: The 47th

Mike Bartlett has played around with pastiche in the past, never more successfully than when King Charles III took Shakespearean themes and language and applied them to an imagined future of the British Royal family. Later this week he'll be premiering his take on Restoration Comedy, but for The 47th he returns to blank verse, also reuniting with director Rupert Goold, and Lydia Wilson on Lady Macbeth duties, although the venue changes to the much larger Old Vic, befitting a lead character who's fond of a rally: As with the previous production, most of the fictionalised characters aren't played as impressions of the real people, but Donald Trump's mannerisms are so pronounced and familiar that it would be odd not to recreate them. And after a few years of TV work where you could actually tell what his face looked like, Bertie Carvel returns to his days as a theatrical chameleon with a comic but creepily uncanny impersonation of the 45th President of the United States.

Theatre review: You Stupid Darkness!

Andy Rush and Andrew Finnigan in a play together at last, and it's not written by Tom Wells? It must be the End of Days. In Sam Steiner's strangely positive tragicomedy You Stupid Darkness! it actually is the End of Days, but rather than a single explosive event this is a slow-burning Apocalypse that's very gradually but inexorably rolling out across the world. The unnamed event has left the air toxic; next to parts of the city that are still liveable are no-go areas, the (presumably quarantined) residents horribly infected. Whole towns get suddenly wiped out and one day all the trees fell down, but it's not all over quite yet, and until it is everyone might as well just get on with their lives. So 17-year-old Joey (Finnigan) still has to get his work experience credit for school, and every Tuesday night goes to Brightline, a late-night helpline where he and three other volunteers take calls from people struggling to cope with Everything That’s Happening.