Theatre review: The New Real

My relationship with David Edgar's plays has been mixed: I think my still-strong memories of enjoying Pentecost in the '90s make me always want to give his new work a try, but the RSC's most-commissioned modern writer was also responsible for the notoriously dreary Written on the Heart, and after last week's meh Here In America I felt a bit of trepidation towards the second of his premieres this autumn. The New Real is also described by the blurb as both "epic" and "panoramic," so they're really making sure you know it's going to be long. Still, my first show at Stratford's The Other Place since it was serving as The Courtyard twelve years ago turns out to be flawed, but worth checking out. Edgar returns to Eastern Europe and an unnamed former Soviet state, in a story spanning the last 22 years and looking at the question that has been worrying many political playwrights: How did politics move so far to the Right and so far from reality in that time?

Theatre review: Minority Report

I still have strong memories of the Lyric Hammersmith successfully translating science fiction to the stage with the striking Solaris a few years ago, so while it's a different creative team tackling Philip K. Dick, who inspired a number of the most successful sci-fi movies of all time, I was still optimistic that a venue willing to give the genre a chance would be a good choice to continue the experiment. Minority Report is quite a different proposition from the moody spookiness of Solaris, with the added challenges of a lot of action scenes, and Max Webster's production deals with them with varied - though mostly positive - results. But first, how to ensure future dystopia has the requisite dark cityscape of permanent rain? Adaptor David Haig has solved it by setting the story in London, so the view on stage isn't too different from the one out of the windows.

Theatre review: Cuckoo

The opening scene of Cuckoo is funny, but feels like it comes from an already-dated play: Women from three generations sit around a dining table silently, all glued to their mobile phones. They're not quite ignoring each other, as a lot of the messages, jokes and funny videos they're looking at they forward right on to each other and share a laugh. But it's still a disconnected kind of family scene, and when Sarah (Jodie McNee) arrives with the fish and chips, she still struggles to get her mother Doreen (Sue Jenkins,) sister Carmel (Michelle Butterly) and niece Megyn (Emma Harrison) to put their phones down and talk to each other. When they do, the conversation turns to climate change and the teenage Megyn, who’s already been almost silent, has some kind of emotional breakdown and runs upstairs to her grandmother’s bedroom.

Theatre review: Orlando

With the changing understanding of gender, and the arrival of bankable non-binary stars like Emma Corrin in recent years, it's not surprising if this seems an apt time to revisit Virginia Woolf's original gender-bending story, Orlando, on stage. The aristocratic Orlando (Corrin) is born during the reign of Elizabeth I (Lucy Briers,) who toys with the idea of recruiting the then 15-year-old boy to her court. As he grows up, he remains close to the seat of power, but the kings and queens seem to change constantly, as Orlando ages much more slowly than he should. So by the time Charles II is on the throne the nobleman is only 30, and takes a job as ambassador to Constantinople. Having spent his life avoiding settling down with one person because that life doesn't offer answers to his many and vague questions about the universe, he continues a life of wine and women - until his sudden death.

Theatre review: Faustus: That Damned Woman

The last time Christopher Marlowe's version of the Doctor Faustus story was seen in London, the Swanamaker cast a female lead to take the journey through knowledge to damnation, but the text remained the same one written by and for a man. For Headlong's production, which opens its tour at the Lyric Hammersmith, a new playwright takes a crack at the old story, retelling it to ask what would make a woman sell her soul in Chris Bush's Faustus: That Damned Woman. Revenge turns out to be the answer, at least as the initial spur, when in 1666 London Johanna Faustus (Jodie McNee) is obsessed with finding out the truth about her mother, who was hanged as a witch. The charge was that she signed her name in Lucifer's book of souls, and Faustus is determined to find out if this was true, even if she has to summon the devil himself to ask him. Lucifer (Barnaby Power) agrees to let her read his book, but only if she signs her own name first and damns herself.

Theatre review: Venice Preserved

I've seen Venice Preserved once before, but as that particular production was an incoherent car crash that was 50% sales presentation for a property development and 50% people desperately shouting "immersive!" at you while asking for money for four hours, it's probably easiest all round to just treat Thomas Otway's Restoration thriller as completely new to me. Prasanna Puwanarajah directs a mercifully coherent production, although how much sense the plot itself makes remains up for debate. Jaffeir (Michael Grady-Hall) is recruited by his best friend Pierre (Stephen Fewell) to join a bloody rebellion against the corrupt ruling class of Venice; both swear loyalty to the cause, but each also has a personal vendetta against some member of the senate which is the real clincher in wanting to bring them down. In Jaffeir's case, it's his senator father-in-law Priuli (Les Dennis,) who disapproved of the marriage and went out of his way to punish him for it.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Whenever I review a Shakespeare play, I make a note in the subject line of the company or venue, as there's so many productions of his plays I think it's best to be clear which one I'm talking about. I almost feel like I should do the same for Our Country's Good, because despite only first seeing it in 2012, this is now my third production. Timberlake Wertenbaker's play is an undisputed modern classic (though not one of the 101 best play ever according to Michael Billington but it's fine - he asked an imaginary woman what she thought and she agreed with him.) Based on true events, it follows one of the first shipments of convicts to be transported to Australia in 1788, to the area that would become Sydney. For the duration of their sentences they will remain prisoners, watched over by the army, but when their time is done they'll be sent out to colonise the new land.

Theatre review: Game

Ever since Cock, Mike Bartlett has been writing plays based around a very specific set design, often putting his central characters under vicious attack. After that first cockfight, and the recent bullfight, he now puts a young couple in the middle of a real-life shoot-'em-up video game. The first of a number of plays coming up that look at the spiralling cost of housing, Game sees Ashley (Mike Noble) and Carly (Jodie McNee) move into a luxury two-storey apartment for free. Of course, there's a catch: Like the Big Brother house, Ashley and Carly's new home is under 24-hour camera surveillance, and every wall is a two-way mirror behind which visitors can watch them. But simply watching isn't the main attraction - paying customers are there to play a kind of human safari. At any time of day, an unseen stranger might shoot one of them with a tranquilliser dart. And this isn't a TV set but the home where the couple plan to live and raise a family for several years.

Theatre review: 3 Winters

As we reach Nicholas Hytner's final months running the National, a number of the most successful creatives from the last few years of his reign feature heavily. Howard Davies has been most closely associated with directing Russian classics on the Lyttelton stage, and though his latest production is a new Croatian play, it feels very much part of this ongoing series. In part it comes down to the set, this time provided by Tim Hatley: These shows have been noted for their audacious scene changes, and they're not only present and correct but a vital component of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters. This is because the winters in the story occur decades apart in the same house, and to the same family. In 1945, as the Communists take over, they evict the old royalist families. Rose (Jo Herbert,) her husband Alexander (Alex Price in 1945, James Laurenson in 1990) and their baby daughter Masha are allocated a large room in the mansion where Rose's mother Monika (Josie Walker) was once a servant.

Theatre review: Hobson's Choice

Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice is apparently both a GCSE text and an old stalwart of regional rep. As a result it's the sort of play whose title I'm familiar with but I've never actually seen. Written in 1915 but set in Victorian Salford, it gets a further time shift in Nadia Fall's production in Regent's Park, which moves the action to the 1960s - probably as late as you could take its title character's attitudes. The affable Mark Benton plays against type as Henry Horatio Hobson, who's run his own shoe shop for years. But since the death of his wife, his daughters Maggie (Jodie McNee,) Alice (Nadia Clifford) and Vickey (Hannah Britland) have been running the place for no wages, while he spends his days in the local pub, the Moonraker's¹. But business is booming, because in the basement workshop is young shoemaker Willie Mossop (Big Favourite Round These Parts Karl Davies) whose boots are so good all the wealthier ladies of Salford flock to the shop.

Theatre review: The Empty Quarter

Greg and Holly moved to Dubai as a result of a vague romantic attraction of Holly's to the desert. In fact when we first meet them, Holly (Jodie McNee) is recovering from wandering off out into it and getting lost. Greg (Gunnar Cauthery) hasn't taken to the place and, concerned about his wife's health as she continues to be fascinated by the desert that nearly killed her, quits his job in the hope that it'll shock her into returning to the UK with him. But he's reckoned without the draconian local laws against getting into debt. One missed mortgage payment later and he's in a Middle Eastern prison, and the only way out is a loan from the closest thing they have to friends out there, an older English couple. And a business deal with Gemma (Geraldine Alexander) and Patrick (David Hounslow) ends up looking more like a Faustian pact when the two couples become the only constant in each other's lives.

Theatre review: A Life of Galileo

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The RSC isn't inviting the Press to this until Tuesday.

To round off the RSC's "A World Elsewhere" season, looking at what else was going on in the world during Shakespeare's lifetime, we have a 20th century classic that deals with one of Shakespeare's exact contemporaries, Brecht's A Life of Galileo. Always strapped for cash, Galileo Galilei passes off the Dutch invention, the telescope, as one of his own. He gets found out but not before the new tool gives him a new look at the heavens, and he realises he's found proof of Copernicus' theory that the Earth rotates around the Sun. The fact that the theory is considered heretical by the Catholic Church doesn't dim his enthusiasm or deter him from sharing his knowledge with the people. But the Church won't let mere evidence get in the way of centuries of teaching, and soon the Inquisition has taken an interest, demanding that Galileo betray his science and abjure his theory.