Theatre review: Macbeth (RSC / The Other Place)

Macbeth is one of the Shakespearean big hitters that can generally be relied upon to sell well in the RSC's biggest auditorium, so it's interesting to see a comparatively starry production get consigned to the studio space. Maybe it's a tribute to the famous McKellen/Dench production that also played The Other Place in the 1970s; more likely it's that Daniel Raggett's production didn't want to sacrifice the intimacy that becomes a major feature of its single setting. That setting is a Scottish pub run by Sam Heughan's Macbeth and Lia Williams' Lady Macbeth, the base of operations for a violent '80s criminal gang run by Duncan (Gilly Gilchrist,) who makes his intentions clear about who should eventually replace him: Early on his son Malcolm (Calum Ross) is made, possibly as a sort of initiation, to slit the throat of the treacherous Cawdor with a box cutter. But a supernatural trio has other ideas.

Theatre review: John Gabriel Borkman

John Gabriel Borkman isn't one of the more frequently-produced Henrik Ibsen plays - I've only ever seen it once before, and then in a short, heavily rewritten, monologue adaptation. It can't be topicality that's the problem - given that the title character is a corrupt, arrogant banker, you could theoretically have a production of it playing somewhere in the world 24/7 and guarantee the famous phrase "timely revival" got chucked at it. It does, however, conform to all the stereotypes about Ibsen's work being dark, moody and bleak. JG Borkman (Simon Russell Beale,) once a financial giant, was convicted of embezzlement. He spent five years in prison and, since his release, a further eight years essentially under self-imposed house arrest. In the first act, all we know of him is the sound of him relentlessly pacing his room.

Theatre review: The Night of the Iguana

The latest Tennessee Williams revival features many characteristic elements from his most famous work, but also feels like a departure that hints at the more experimental phase he went into later in his career: Set in 1940 in a ramshackle, inaccessible Mexican hotel at the edge of the rainforest, The Night of the Iguana is a melodrama touching on a number of characters, but predominantly focusing on a trio of Americans: The Rev T. Lawrence Shannon (Clive Owen) is an alcoholic, not-technically-defrocked minister driven out of his church and the US for statutory rape; he makes a living as a tour guide, but his tendency to fall off the wagon every 18 months – and the ensuing meltdown – doesn’t endear him to the busloads of middle-aged women he shows around the area. He’s just had his latest lapse as the play begins, and instead of taking his tour group to the city hotel on their itinerary has brought them here, in the hopes that spending time with his friend the owner will help him.

Theatre review: Pinter One - Press Conference / Precisely / The New World Order / Mountain Language / American Football / The Pres and an Officer / Death / One for the Road / Ashes to Ashes

Preview disclaimer: Pinter One invites the critics in next week.

Pinter One is the collective name being given to a nonuple bill of short writing by Harold Pinter that launches Pinter at the Pinter, the Jamie Lloyd Company's ambitious project to stage all of Harold Pinter's one-act plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre. I'm going to be using the word "Pinter" a lot over the next few months, is what I'm saying. Originally announced as a quadruple bill, other poems and sketches have been gradually getting added so that the evening's full title should now be Press Conference / Precisely / The New World Order / Mountain Language / American Football / The Pres and an Officer / Death / One for the Road / Ashes to Ashes. Which may explain why they renamed it Pinter One. Lloyd directs the first eight playlets and poems in a selection linked by an overtly political theme.

Theatre review: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Lia Williams takes on another iconic role as the Donald and Margot Warehouse stages Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in a new adaptation by David Harrower. In a private Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s, the final year of juniors is taught by Williams' titular Miss Brodie, a free spirit who avoids the curriculum wherever possible, preferring to teach "her girls" to be independent thinkers - as well as how to deport themselves in her own image, and aim for future success in the fields she believes them best-suited to. Sharing with them stories of her European travels and tragedies from her personal life, she becomes an inspirational figure many of them stay loyal to even when they've moved on to senior school, returning to spend time with her and the male teachers who are similarly enraptured by her. But as time goes on Sandy (Rona Morison) starts to see the cracks in her idol.

Theatre review: Mary Stuart

My first theatre trip of 2017 should have been one of my last of 2016, but the performance I was due to see was one of several cancelled due to cast illness - presumably the gastroenteritis that's knocked out half the West End and got me last month as well. But everyone's back on their feet now for the latest of Robert Icke's classic reinventions at the Almeida, Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart. In the battle of wills between the last Tudor monarch and her great rival, Icke sees the women as two sides of the same coin - literally, as two actresses share both roles, with a coin spun at the beginning of the performance to decide who plays who. Tonight Lia Williams called heads and won, so the assembled cast bowed to her as Queen Elizabeth I, who's been ruling for eight years and has restored Protestantism to England - along with a stability the country hasn't known for a long time.

Theatre review: Oresteia (Almeida Theatre)

Freud used characters from Greek tragedy as archetypes and now Robert Icke reverses the process, turning Aeschylus' Oresteia into a complex psychological study of Orestes - his actions, the contradictory aspects of his personality, and above all the unreliability of his memories. And that's only one of the ways Icke rewrites the rulebook in his glorious headfuck of a production, which it seems ridiculous to even attempt a short review of: By the second interval I already thought I could write an essay about it. It's unlikely a recording of it will be commercially released but I hope it's at least easily available to students, as it could be good fodder for dissertations for years to come. The story, at least, is the same one it always was: To help him win a war, Agamemnon (Angus Wright) sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. On his return, his wife Klytemnestra (Lia Williams) murders him in revenge.

Theatre review: The Match Box

Actors making a first foray into writing or directing for the stage is going to be a bit of a meme this summer. First up is Lia Williams who turns director for Frank McGuinness' new play, a monologue first seen in Liverpool last year. The Match Box takes place in a battered holiday home on a remote Irish island where Sal, a Liverpudlian of Irish descent (Leanne Best) now lives alone. A single mother, her 12-year-old daughter was caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting and killed. Sal's story is of course a heartbreaking one of loss, and her inability to process her grief is powerfully conveyed. But when the dust settles and it becomes clear the killers will never be brought to justice, the play starts to enter even darker territory: Sal and her parents start to mutter things about revenge, but did they really have anything to do with the violent fate of the prime suspects?

Theatre review: Old Times

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Old Times is having a lengthy preview period and doesn't invite the official critics in for another week.

A Harold Pinter play gets staged at the Harold Pinter Theatre for the first time since it was renamed in his memory, Ian Rickson directing Kristin Scott Thomas, Rufus Sewell and Lia Williams in 1971's Old Times. Kate (Scott Thomas) is waiting, with what looks like quite a lot of apprehension, for the arrival of an old friend: She used to share a flat with Anna (Williams,) describing her as her best and only friend, but hasn't seen her in 20 years. Kate's film director husband Deeley (Sewell) has apparently never met Anna before, but seems more enthusiastic about her return than his wife does. In two scenes, the three reminisce about earlier days and how Kate and Deeley met, but not only do their memories start to look conflicting and unreliable, but it seems both Kate and Deeley have an intimate physical history with Anna they'd previously kept to themselves.