Theatre review: The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare's Globe)

There's only really two things wrong with The Taming of the Shrew: One of them is half the plot, and the other is the other half. In Padua, the beautiful Bianca (Sophie Mercell) has many suitors, including the wealthy locals Gremio (Nigel Barrett) and Hortensio (Lizzie Hopley,) and recently-arrived Lucentio (Yasmin Taheri.) They compete for Bianca's hand in a needlessly convoluted scheme involving assuming fake identities, swapping around real identities, and a steadfast refusal to say a single funny line. The other storyline gives the play its title, as Bianca is not allowed to get married until her older sister Katherina (Thalissa Teixeira) does, and as she's considered a difficult woman, it seems she never will. So Hortensio recruits his mercenary friend Petruchio (Andrew Leung) to marry Katherina (it's not like she has any say in the matter) and once that's done he proceeds to bend her to his will through a sustained campaign of gaslighting and literal torture as defined by the UN.

Theatre review: Titus Andronicus(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Going into the Swanamaker's tenth year, creatives haven't yet got over the novelty of the candlelit playhouse and the idea of using it as a theme in their productions. Usually it's the unique way light and darkness work in there that provide the inspiration, but in Jude Christian's new production it's the physical candles and wax that take on a new significance. And the play is Titus Andronicus so that significance is, obviously, connected to death and maiming. In the first production I saw, Katy Stephens played Tamora, Titus' nemesis. In this all-female cast she gets to switch places to the title role: In this completely invented chapter of Shakespeare's Roman plays, Titus is a decorated general, most of whose 25 sons have died defending Rome. The remainder, as well as his sole daughter Lavinia (Georgia-Mae Myers) become collateral damage in a more personal battle, after he sacrifices the eldest son of defeated Goth queen Tamora (Kirsten Foster.)

Stage-to-screen review: Dick Whittington(National Theatre)

British theatres' biggest annual earner, the Christmas pantomime, attempted a limited return in those areas that were allowed to, before everything got promptly shut down again (it's OK though, the Culture Secretary and Prince William had already been very publicly allowed to take their families to one, so it's not like anyone who matters was being excluded.) In what is hopefully a one-off attempt to make up for something people were missing out on elsewhere, the National Theatre were one of the venues putting on a panto, with an updated version of a Jude Christian and Cariad Lloyd script for Dick Whittington first seen at the Lyric Hammersmith two years ago. When this too was put on ice, they put Ned Bennett's new production up on YouTube for a few days over Christmas (available for free internationally, which raises the possibility of people all over the world watching and being baffled by the British concept of wholesome family entertainment consisting predominantly of dick jokes.)

Theatre review: Trust

My first visit to the Gate since Ellen McDougall took over as artistic director, and as soon as you get into the building you can tell she’s kept one of her predecessor’s innovations and taken it to the next level: Christopher Haydon introduced the idea of commissioning artists to decorate the staircase and front-of-house with artworks that reflected the current production, and Jude Christian’s production of Trust, designed by Bethany Wells, is in its entirety an art installation. Wells has turned FOH into a building site, the future home of some luxury development, while sound designer Ben Ringham has installed a recording of a Spanish language lesson in the toilets. Christian’s own installation is, essentially, the director herself – she’s set up a bedroom at the edge of the auditorium and has moved into it for the duration of the play’s run, and also appears in the show as one of the performers alongside Pia Laborde Noguez and Zephryn Taitte.

Theatre review: My Mum's a Twat

First-time playwrights often prove naturals at certain aspects of the job, while others need to be developed over time. One thing Anoushka Warden has clearly got an instinct for is coming up with a title that’ll get people in to see your play in the first place, as evidenced by her debut My Mum’s a Twat. It’s an autobiographical monologue (it’s described as “an unreliable version of a true story filtered through a hazy memory and vivid imagination”) performed by Future Dame Patsy Ferran on a Chloe Lamford set that at first glance looks like a teenage girl’s bedroom (the audience seating includes beanbags as well as more traditional chairs.) In fact it’s more like a scrapbook come to life, the different sections of the walls decorated with pictures of her favourite things – Tupac, David Jason, her dog – and the shelves full of music and films that remind her of her extended family of siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings.

Theatre review: Bodies

With Future Dame Billie Piper about to reprise her Yerma at the Young Vic, over at the Royal Court we have another childless woman taking a much more pragmatically 21st century approach to the problem. She’s not yet got the profile of someone like James Graham, Lucy Kirkwood or Polly Stenham but ever since her debut with Mogadishu* Vivienne Franzmann has been delivering such consistently good work she’s as much of a must-see playwright for me as any of them. In Bodies the woman desperate for a child is Clem (Justine Mitchell,) who after five miscarriages has opted for surrogacy. Her husband Josh (Jonathan McGuinness, reading in the role after Brian Ferguson got ill,) will provide the sperm, the eggs come from an unknown woman in Russia, while actually carrying the baby will be Lakshmi (Salma Hoque) in India, where surrogates have very few rights.

Theatre review: Lela & co

Real-life atrocities are given an additional level of horror by the smiling face painted on them by Cordelia Lynn's Lela & co. Ana Inés Jabares Pita's black, white and red set feels like something out of a toybox or a circus, a setting for Lela (Katie West) to tell a fairytale-like life story of growing up in the mountains of an unnamed, distant country. There's early signs of an underlying darkness she takes for granted, as she cheerfully recounts how her father would occasionally get violent with his wife and daughters, but the worst is to come once Lela reaches the age of 15. More importantly, this is when her older sister gets married: Her new brother-in-law may or may not have sexually abused Lela; what he definitely does do is arrange a marriage for her, possibly for a fee, with a friend from a different part of the country. In the aftermath of a civil war, the girl finds herself isolated from her family with an abusive husband.

Theatre review: Harajuku Girls

Irish-Japanese playwright Francis Turnly tackles one of the less salubrious stereotypes about Japan in Harajuku Girls. Tokyo teenager Mari (Haruka Abe) is about to finish high school, and hopes to go to the national theatre school in the new term. As she waits for her results she spends her free time in her favourite way: Dressing up in Sailor Moon cosplay and going to Jingu Bridge in the Harajuku district, where tourists take photos of the girls in costumes. When her father forbids her from going on her drama course and demands she find an office job, Mari decides to fund it herself, and her hobby could turn into a money-spinner: She follows her best friend Keiko (Elizabeth Tan) to an "image club," a quasi-brothel where girls dress as cops, schoolgirls and anime characters, renting out their time to middle-aged salarymen who want to act out their fantasies.

Theatre review: I'd Rather Goya Robbed Me Of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole

Putting in a bid for the oddest show of the year is the Gate with a play that casts something before swine, although whether or not it's pearls I'm still not altogether sure. Going by the punchy (by recent standards) title of I'd Rather Goya Robbed Me Of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole, Rodrigo Garcia's play, translated here by William Gregory, is a surreal nocturnal ride through Madrid. The title is a bit of a mantra for a man, played by Steffan Rhodri, driven to distraction by insomnia. Rather than be kept awake by the financial and social worries of modern life as he is now, he decides to spend his savings on a wild night culminating in a trip to see Goya's Black Paintings, housed in a museum two blocks away. When he proposes this to his sons though they'd rather go to Disneyland Paris, although for an 11-year-old and a 6-year-old their reasons for wanting to go are rather existential. Not that that's all that's unusual about them.