Theatre review: R and D

After its usual summer lull Hampstead Downstairs starts its new season with Simon Vinnicombe's R and D, a short sci-fi take on grief and betrayal. Lewis (Aden Gillett) is a writer who lost his wife a year ago, and whose moving eulogy for her went viral; the resulting popularity has only driven him further into grief and seclusion. His brother David (Martin Hutson) is a scientist working at some mysterious institute, the nature of which becomes apparent when he asks Lewis to take part, in return for a large fee, in some research and development on a long-running project. April (Jess Murphy) is a highly-realistic humanoid robot, and David and his team have reached the end of what they can find out in the lab. They want Lewis to spend time alone with her and report back on how convincingly human April can be.

Theatre review: The Lightning Child

Euripides' The Bacchae features an antagonist threatened by sexuality, particularly that of women, whose plan to defeat this perceived threat involves him dressing as a woman himself. Throw in that popular Greek tragedy mainstay, the hermaphrodite seer Teiresias (Bette Bourne,) and it's not hard to see why it might have something to say to transgender people to this day, and be ripe for adaptation. Hence The Lightning Child, the final new premiere of the season at Shakespeare's Globe, and the latest collaboration between Ché Walker (book and lyrics) and Arthur Darvill (music and lyrics.) A disco-infused musical adaptation of the gory classic, The Lightning Child opens with Neil Armstrong (Harry Hepple) being cautioned by his wife that his planned mission is hubristic. Armstrong, of course, goes anyway, and in a scene left out of the history books encounters the man in the Moon, aka the Ladyboy Herald (Jonathan Chambers.) An acolyte of Dionysus, the Herald tells the astronaut of another case of hubris that upset the god.

Theatre review: Macbeth (Shakespeare's Globe)

Like many an actor, Eve Best wants to branch out into directing, and following her Beatrice at Shakespeare's Globe she'd had discussions about making that the venue for her directing debut. Apparently she'd imagined being given one of the comedies so when Dominic Dromgoole offered her Macbeth it was a surprise, but one she's embraced - although her interest in staging something lighter in the space is always apparent. It's only three years since the Globe staged Macbeth, in Lucy Bailey's production that embraced the play's dark magic to the point of revealing it as a Faustian story, complete with design straight out of Dante's Inferno. With that in recent memory it's wise of Best to go in a different direction, and she certainly does, making this one of the lightest takes on the play you're likely to see in a long while, embracing the surprisingly frequent opportunities for comedy, and she succeeds just about as well as it's possible to with this interpretation - though it's one with inherent problems.

Theatre review: People

Inevitably one of the biggest theatrical events of the year was always going to be the premiere of the new Alan Bennett play, the latest in his long-standing collaboration with the National Theatre's Artistic Director, Nicholas Hytner. People also reunites Bennett with Frances de la Tour, who had memorable supporting roles in both The History Boys and The Habit of Art, and here gets her turn centre stage. The setting is a crumbling country pile somewhere in South Yorkshire. The house and most of its contents are, in theory, priceless, but death duties have left little money to actually take care of the place, and it's now an unheated mausoleum, occupied by two batty old ladies: Dorothy (de la Tour,) the owner, who lives a virtual hermit's life and only keeps up with "current" events via a pile of newspapers from 1982; and her even battier friend Iris (Linda Bassett,) who sits in a world of her own knitting scarves for the troops (Dorothy's informed her there's a war on in the Falklands.)