Theatre review: Tree

It’s meant to be something of a party but the Young Vic’s Tree will likely be remembered as the show where Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah Milkshake Ducked, after the controversy over how much of the show they’re credited with creating actually owes to writers Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley. The latter two are credited in the programme notes as having “helped Elba along the way” – in his personal list of thanks, not the official acknowledgements – and under the circumstances it’s interesting to note that there’s no specific writing credit anywhere. But obviously I have no way of judging who’s in the right so all I can say is what the finished article is like. I can say that from an audience point of view it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster figuring out if the show would give me backache – I booked when it went on sale back in November 2018 before the configuration had been finalised, and a couple of months ago the website blurb announced that Tree was meant to be experienced standing, with only a handful of seated tickets available for those with access issues.

Theatre review: Mood Music

It takes a while for plays to get commissioned, written and programmed, so we haven’t seen a major theatre touch directly on the Kevin Spacey story yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Given the hamfisted way it dealt with the aftermath, is it particularly likely that theatre will be the Old Vic itself? In the meantime, Spacey’s successor Matthew Warchus has said there is a certain element of acknowledging the subject in his programming Mood Music, even if Joe Penhall’s new play touches more on the wider subject of powerful men’s treatment of younger women, than the specific one of a powerful man’s treatment of younger men. In any case even that’s arguably not what Mood Music’s really about: Up-and-coming singer Cat (Seána Kerslake) is thrilled to find out that industry legend Bernard (Ben Chaplin) will be producing her first album. He was, in fact, just looking for a female singer to take lead vocals on an album he’d written, but agrees to work on her songs instead.

Theatre review: Othello (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

With its black title character Othello is, unsurprisingly, most often used as a way of looking at racism, but for the last of this year's Swanamaker season Ellen McDougall has a different approach in mind. After all, the only overt racism in the play comes from Othello's enemies, but with help from a little tinkering with the text McDougall exposes how the misogyny in the play's world is even more deep-rooted. General Othello (Kurt Egyiawan) has made Michelle Cassio (Joanna Horton) his new lieutenant, to the fury of his ensign Iago (Sam Spruell,) who'd been expecting the promotion. Using his reputation as the most trusted of the officers, Iago decides to take revenge in a slow, insidious way.

Theatre review: Measure for Measure (Shakespeare's Globe)

Of the three major productions of Measure for Measure in London this year, Shakespeare's Globe was always going to offer the least high-concept approach. I'm not sure I expected its opening to be quite so literal though: About 10 minutes before it starts, the Globe fills with actors, running around the groundlings and climbing up ladders to the higher galleries. Some offer the services of whores, others are preaching against all the debauchery around them. Meanwhile Dominic Rowan sits quietly onstage with his back to both the sexual freedoms enjoyed in Vienna, and to those offended by them. Because Rowan is the Duke, literally turning his back on behaviour that, in theory, carries the harshest penalties in his state. But he's let these laws lapse for decades, and doesn't know how to enforce them again. So instead he's going to take a leave of absence, leaving the city in the hands of the severe Angelo (Kurt Egyiawan,) who he thinks will bring back the morality laws.

Theatre review: The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco

Set in 1986, in a Zimbabwe still finding its post-independence feet, Andrew Whaley's The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco is set in a police station cell in the middle of the night. Getting aggressive with the police has landed Chidhina (Kurt Egyiawan,) Jungle (Gary Beadle) and Febi (Joan Iyiola) in here, and they're bickering their way through the night when a fourth prisoner materialises, seemingly out of nowhere. Ragged, wrapped in a tattered blanket and looking confused and afraid, he initially doesn't speak but it eventually comes out that Comrade Fiasco (Abdul Salis) was a freedom-fighter in the late 1970s. Hiding in a mountain cave for safety, he ended up losing track of time and only being discovered eight years later. By the time he rejoined the world the independence he was fighting for had been achieved, and the Zimbabwe he now sees isn't the one he knew.

Theatre review: A Season in the Congo

The film director and Keira Knightley-enabler Joe Wright only made his theatrical debut a few months ago, but he's already looking very assured in his follow-up, A Season in the Congo. Aimé Césaire's play was written in 1966, only a few years after the events it describes, as it follows the story of Congolese independence through the eyes of its first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. A former beer salesman who'd sneak rhetoric against the Belgian colonists into his sales pitch, a few years later he would win the country's first democratic election. But his idealism overlooks both the Belgians' sneaky plan to hold onto financial interests in their former colony, and the tribal enmities it will exploit to do so. Within a few months he has catastrophically lost control, and inadvertently paved the way for a far from democratic Congo.

Theatre review: Berenice

For the fifth production in Josie Rourke's... unusual first year in charge of the Donmar, designer Lucy Osborne has partly reconfigured the auditorium, moving one of the stalls seating blocks. Combined with the curved wooden staircase that forms the set's centrepiece, it creates a kind of spiral in-the-round staging, and as the whole stage is covered with sand, it feels as if this production of Racine's Berenice is being performed inside a sea shell. Rourke directs, and the novelist Alan Hollinghurst makes a rare foray into theatre to write the translation of one of Racine's Roman tragedies. Titus, who has just become Emperor of Rome, is in love with Berenice and plans to marry her. But Berenice is a foreign queen, and despite having lived through Caligula and Nero, the idea of the Emperor marrying an outsider, let alone a member of a hereditary royalty, remains one of the most appalling things he can do in the eyes of the Roman people.