Theatre review: Coriolanus (National Theatre)

This year's National Theatre Shakespeare is a fairly rarely-performed one, and one that I'm generally pretty happy to have stay that way; it does though get a big selling point in David Oyelowo making a long-awaited return to the stage to play Coriolanus. Set in the days of the Roman Republic, Oyelowo's Caius Martius is a nobleman and general who earned his titular surname by almost single-handedly sacking the city of Coriolis, stronghold of the enemy Volscians. On his return to Rome, among the honours heaped on him is the expectation that the next stage in his career will be election as Consul, a position of considerable political power. But first he has to gain the support of the public, whose Tribunes Sicinius and Brutus (Stephanie Street and Jordan Metcalfe) are determined to show him up as unsuitable for power.

Stage-to-screen review: Lights Up - The Winter's Tale

The RSC's a funny old company, isn't it? At one time considered downright avant-garde, in the last four decades its reputation has gone to the opposite extreme, as a byword for safe, old-fashioned, "heritage" Shakespeare. Nowadays I'd say it sometimes tries (with wildly varying levels of success) to push the envelope, but for the most part slips back into the kind of Shakespeare that reveres the text just that little bit too much over the theatricality. They make for an odd choice to provide the longest, largest-scale entry in the BBC's Lights Up festival, following as they do a lot of new writing with small casts and current concerns. Exactly what concerns Erica Whyman's production of The Winter's Tale deals with is anybody's guess, as apart from a couple of neat design ideas I came out of it with not much clue as to how Whyman interprets the odd, bleak story of Sicilian king Leontes (Joseph Kloska,) who essentially has a complete personality change mid-sentence, accusing his wife Hermione (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) and best friend Polixenes (Andrew French) of having an affair.

Theatre review: Wild East

The Young Vic's Clare Studio continues to be the home for the Genesis Future Director Award Winners, and 2019's first production sees Lekan Lawal take on April De Angelis' absurdist take on the job interview from Hell format, 2005's Wild East. Frank (Zach Wyatt) is a socially inept anthropology graduate applying for a job at a company that collates and analyses data from people in emerging markets, for use in product marketing. It seems an unlikely match for him but it would involve spending a lot of time in Russia, a country he's always felt a strong connection to, and where a girl he likes lives. So he's keen to impress his interviewers, but even if his lack of social skills didn't trip him up, the fact that Dr Pitt (Lucy Briers) and Dr Gray (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) start imploding in front of him will.

Theatre review: The Sweet Science of Bruising

I don't think we can really call it a 2018 meme when it's so obviously a timely and appropriate response to a conversation going on everywhere, and particularly in the arts, but there's certainly been an explosion this year of shows by and about women: Particularly ones like Emilia, Sylvia and, just ending its run in the space next door to this one, Wasted, that illuminate the present through the women who've fought against society's expectations in the past. That fight is literal in Joy Wilkinson's The Sweet Science of Bruising: Her subject is Victorian women's boxing, her heroines four women from very different backgrounds who all find themselves fighting for a newly-invented world championship title when London boxing promoter Professor Charlie Sharp (Bruce Alexander) travels to Manchester in search of new talent, and discovers that promising fighter Paul Stokes (James Baxter) has a girlfriend, Polly (Fiona Skinner,) who's every bit as good if not more so.

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Custom/Practice / Almeida & Edinburgh Assembly)

Doing a few performances as part of this year's Almeida Festival (prior to an Edinburgh Fringe run next month) is new-ish theatre company Custom/Practice's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The night before Duke Theseus' wedding, two young couples run away to the woods. Also there are a band of workmen, rehearsing a ludicrous amateur play they intend to perform at the royal wedding. Both groups get caught up in the machinations of Oberon (Liam Mansfield) and Titania (Kemi-bo Jacobs,) King and Queen of the Fairies, and Oberon's henchman Puck (Lanre Malaolu, who coincidentally I also saw play Puck when he understudied the role at the RSC last year.) Rae McKen's production opens with a high concept of a group of schoolkids being made to read A Midsummer Night's Dream for detention, only for Puck to take on the guise of their teacher and make them inhabit the roles for real.