Theatre review: Twelfth Night or What You Will(Shakespeare's Globe)

Despite its wintery title the season Twelfth Night is most commonly associated with is Autumn, usually accompanied by some variation of the dreaded phrase "Shakespeare's melancholy farewell to comedy" in the blurb. Well there's certainly something autumnal about Robin Belfield's production at the Globe, but it's more pagan harvest festival than sad falling leaves. Under a gold wooden sun and featuring a wicker man, Jean Chan's design is all brashly colourful carnival outfits. It's a mood that's infected almost everyone in Illyria, including its Duke who's often seen opening the play lounging moodily on cushions. Instead Solomon Israel's Orsino is definitely up for the party, and is just a bit annoyed that the girl he fancies isn't joining in, or returning his interest - and all because she's still in mourning for all the men in her family dropping dead over the course of a couple of months, honestly some people, such drama queens.

Theatre review: Otherland

Chris Bush's Otherland opens with an otherwise happy couple divorcing over one insurmountable issue; the rest of the two and a half hours follows each of them through the huge physical and emotional changes that come next. Jo (Jade Anouka) has always known her husband identified as a woman but had no intention of transitioning, and it never caused any problems. But after ten years together Harry (Fizz Sinclair) has decided it's time to be her real self, and while bisexual Jo is primarily attracted to women, it turns out the woman Harry has become isn't one of them. They separate and largely lose contact, and while Jo meets a new partner in Gabby (Amanda Wilkin,) Harry has to navigate both the legal obstacles to having her gender recognised, and the personal milestones with her family: Her initially supportive-seeming mother Elaine (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune) is actually constantly deadnaming her and dismissing her transition.

Theatre review: The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare's Globe)

Sean Holmes liked a touch of European avant garde theatre when he was running the Lyric Hammersmith, and since coming to Shakespeare's Globe he's been responsible for some of the more eye-catching high-concept productions there, but this year he gets the tights and codpieces of the more "heritage" shows for The Comedy of Errors. There's also a hint of Les Misérables as the show opens, with flag-waving and singing about how great Ephesus is, and how they've fought back against the injustices done to them by Syracuse, with a hostile environment (/automatic death sentence) for any Syracusians who wash up on their shores. This is bad news for a number of the characters, but particularly Egeus (Paul Rider,) who's the only one to get caught. Egeus was shipwrecked while searching for his long-lost identical twin sons, and their identical twin servants.

Theatre review:Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights

After last year's Metamorphoses, another winter's evening of adult - sometimes very adult - storytelling by candlelight at the Swanamaker. This time it's Hannah Khalil's take on the 1001 Nights, which she reimagines as much less of a one-woman show than it's usually seen as. For Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, Rosa Maggiora's set is a dungeon, comparatively comfortable with piles of cushions and plates of fruit but a prison nonetheless, where four women have been kept for so long they've lost track of time. When they're joined by a fifth, Fatah the Young (Alaa Habib,) they have to break it to the teenager that the marriage she's been preparing for isn't all it seems: When the King's first wife cheated on him, he vowed revenge on all women. He takes a new wife every night, and after some no-doubt-entirely-consensual sex, murders her. The plan is to eliminate every unmarried woman in his kingdom, and he's nearly done.

Theatre review:Once Upon A Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia

It's not often the main focus of war movies or other popular culture, so I'm probably not alone in finding where Africa fits into the Second World War something of a blind spot. If German officer Grandma (Adrian Edmondson) is to be believed, it was seen as a backwater during the War as well: He says the most promising Nazis are kept in Europe, and only the "animals" are sent to Africa where nobody's paying much attention to what they might get up to. Josh Azouz' Once Upon A Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia takes place in 1942, when officers like Grandma and his henchman Little Fella* (Daniel Rainford) presided over a somewhat precarious occupation: Their defeat of the hated French gave them some degree of sympathy with the Arab locals, but while there wasn't much resistance to the persecution of Jews in Tunis, neither did they find the enthusiastic allies they hoped for - perhaps because, under the Nazis' rhetoric supporting an independent nation, many knew that once they were done with the Jews, the Muslims would likely be next.

Theatre review: A History of Water in the Middle East

A History of Water in the Middle East sounds like the title of a lecture, and that’s its conceit – and kind of what it is, albeit in an inevitably more theatrical form Upstairs at the Royal Court. It has an unlikely origin: Writer/performer Sabrina Mahfouz has dual British/Egyptian nationality which, when she graduated from university, made her of interest to MI5 recruiters. She applied to become a British spy, but found that the vetting process seemed to be ruling her out largely because of the same background that had made her a candidate in the first place. One of the sticking points was her thesis about water in the Middle East, and the many ways over the last two centuries that it’s been both used as an instrument of colonisation and weaponised in the conflicts that followed. Together with Laura Hanna, who has a similar ethnic background to Mahfouz and does the heavy lifting where the singing’s concerned, she gives us a potted history of the region through story and song.

Theatre review: The Sweethearts

Sarah Page's play The Sweethearts, which has graduated from a Vibrant reading to a full production at the Finborough, introduces us to two very different sets of characters: First, a troop in Afghanistan, preparing to hand over power but still getting regularly attacked by the Taliban. Mark (Jack Derges) is the resident ladies' man with delusions of being Maverick from Top Gun; David (Joe Claflin) the intellectual of the group, teased for writing poetry; Trevor (Jack Bannon) is a relative newcomer who recently dumped his girlfriend back home, and has come to regret it. They're being supervised by their Corporal, Rachel (Laura Hanna,) one of the lads except in her obvious crush on their Commanding Officer, Captain Nicholls (Stevie Raine,) a much-decorated hero they all hold in awe to one degree or another.