Theatre review: Top Girls

Which five people, living or dead, real or fictional, would you invite to your dream dinner party? To most people that’s a creaky old conversation-starter, but to Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) it’s the perfect way to celebrate a promotion, in the famous opening act of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. It’s 1981, Marlene’s become the first female Managing Director of Top Girls Employment Agency, and she’s gone to a trendy restaurant with five women from history and legend who embody a female ideal - or at least someone’s idea of it. Victorian adventurer Isabella Bird (Siobhan Redmond) and 13th century Japanese concubine, Buddhist nun and author Lady Nijō (Wendy Kweh) made their own way in a man’s world while others, like Pope Joan (Amanda Lawrence) and Brueghel’s soldier-woman Dull Gret (Ashley McGuire) took on masculine roles, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Theatre review: Jubilee

I have to admit, Chris Goode's Jubilee didn't appeal to me when the Lyric Hammersmith first added it to their programming, and I only changed my mind about booking it when I found out the cast included Lucy Ellinson - she's someone whose performances I try not to miss. So I approached the show cautiously, but hoping to be pleasantly surprised. But while there's some good moments, this attempt to transplant the spirit of punk into the 21st century falls curiously flat. Derek Jarman's iconic 1978 film, set the year before during the Queen's Silver Jubilee, gets relocated to 2018 and framed - for reasons I'm still not entirely clear on - by a different Queen Elizabeth: Toyah Willcox, from the original film's cast, appears as Elizabeth I, who makes a Faustian request for divine knowledge, and is granted a vision of a group of genderqueer squatters four centuries into her future.

Theatre review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

In one of the complete restructurings of the Donald and Margot Warehouse auditorium that have been an occasional theme during Josie Rourke's tenure, Peter McKintosh has added an extra row of seats to make the circle in-the-round, and removed all the stalls seating, to be replaced by tables and chairs all around the stage. It transforms the venue into a Prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy for Simon Evans' production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about a man seen as a joke, rising to great power and bringing destruction in his wake. Arturo Ui (Lenny Henry) is a lumbering, awkward gangster who chances upon some dirt on the powerful Dogsborough (Michael Pennington,) and blackmails his way into the city's cauliflower trade. With the success of his protection racket over the vegetable market, Ui takes acting lessons to disguise his awkwardness and make him a better public speaker, and his new mix of threats and rhetoric starts to build a following.

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream - A Play for the Nation (RSC / Barbican & tour)

This year's official "Shakespeare play I'm going to end up seeing so often I'll be quoting it in my sleep" is clearly A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is packing in the productions over the next couple of months - I've got at least three planned between now and July, and I'm not even seeing all the versions London has to offer. First up is Erica Whyman's touring one for the RSC, subtitled A Play for the Nation for reasons that will become apparent. As a royal wedding approaches in ancient Athens, another potential marriage is in jeopardy: Hermia's (Mercy Ojelade) father won't approve of her marrying her beloved Lysander (Jack Holden) because he sees Demetrius (Chris Nayak) as a more suitable match. The two lovers escape to the forest, but Helena (Laura Riseborough,) in love with Demetrius, inexplicably thinks betraying them to him will help her own chances of getting him back.

Theatre review: The Christians

Post-show Q&As often unearth information that reveals much about more than just the production in hand - like the Gate's Artistic Director being an atheist whose mother is a vicar, a contrast he credits as one of the reasons he's often drawn to work with a religious theme. Such as his latest production The Christians, by American playwright Lucas Hnath. An additional draw in this case was the fact that Hnath's mother is also a preacher, albeit in an Evangelical church, and that's where, in an unnamed part of the US, the story takes place. Pastor Paul (William Gaminara) has spent 20 years building a congregation from the ground up, until it's become that most American of phenomena, a Megachurch with worshipers in their thousands. They got into debt to build it but they've finally paid it off, a fact whose timing will become of particular interest as the story plays out.

Theatre review: Grounded

A female fighter pilot flying missions in Iraq and Afghanistan is an interesting subject matter in itself, but it's just the starting point for George Brant's intense monologue Grounded. The Pilot (Lucy Ellinson) is at the top of her game, and in attitude as well as skill she's one of the guys. Back in the US on leave, she finally meets a man who's not intimidated by what she does, and their love story leads to marriage and pregnancy. But the latter isn't compatible with flying jets in a war, and when she returns from maternity leave the Pilot ends up doing the same job in a very different way: Her new plane is a remote-controlled drone, and while it surveys Afghanistan she's in a different desert, doing 12-hour shifts in a trailer outside Las Vegas, and at the end of the day she can go home to her family.

Theatre review: MONEY the Game Show

There's been no shortage of plays about the financial crisis in the last five years but Clare Duffy manages to find both a new angle, and a particularly apt one to depict the cavalier attitude of bankers gambling billions of dollars of other people's money every day. Queenie (Lucy Ellinson) and Casino (Brian Ferguson) used to be hedge fund managers, but tonight they're putting on a show that reflects how their high-risk day job worked. The show starts in the Bush's bar area, where the audience are divided in half according to ticket number, and allocated to either Casino or Queenie's side of the auditorium. We're now on a team that's going to play MONEY the Game Show. At stake is £10,000 - in real £1 coins (I can confirm this - my own comparatively gentle bit of audience participation was to check that the coins were real on behalf of Queenie's team.)

Theatre review: The Trojan Women

After a successful first season of "Revolt," Christopher Haydon at the Gate looks at "Aftermath," and first in the new season is Euripides' classic of those left behind when the fighting ends, The Trojan Women. Poet and playwright Caroline Bird has come up with a loose translation of the play that brings the language and action bang up to date. The war has just ended, and the Trojan men have been killed. The women are waiting in a hospital to find out which Greek general will claim each of them as his slave or concubine. Their babies are being taken from them - allegedly to be raised as Greeks, but it looks likely the reality is grimmer. Lucy Ellinson's Chorus is heavily pregnant, not far from giving birth. The only other occupant of the maternity ward is Troy's former Queen, Hecuba (Dearbhla Molloy,) put in the relatively quiet ward as the one remaining mark of respect afforded to her.

Theatre review: Oh, The Humanity and other good intentions

This seems to be the week for plays made up of shorter playlets, although as Oh, The Humanity and other good intentions consists of five 15-minute scenes, largely monologues, it's miles away from Love and Information's frantic pace. Instead, American playwright Will Eno's stories tend to revolve around people in fairly recognisable situations, who veer away from what they're meant to be saying, to go off on an existential tangent. So the opening scene features John Kirk as the coach of a professional baseball team, holding a press conference under the glare of constantly-flashing cameras. As he tries to explain the disastrous season he's just presided over, his thoughts turn to where life has taken him, and memories of a long-lost love. There's another press conference later, as in the third play a mousy airline employee (Lucy Ellinson) tries to make an official statement in the wake of a fatal crash, but the disaster leads her into memories of her father's death and thoughts of her own mortality.

Theatre review: Tenet

The latest round of Artistic Director Musical Chairs is played at the Gate, where Christopher Haydon's inaugural season comes under the umbrella title "RESIST!" Evariste Galois, a 19th Century French mathematician and radical, died, possibly in a duel, at the age of 20 before getting the chance to fully explore his theories. Having struggled to find a way to tell his story on stage, Lorne Campbell (also directing) and Sandy Grierson finally hit on the unlikely technique of pairing Galois (Jon Foster) with controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Lucy Ellinson,) who quizzes the mathematician on the very specific definition of "the truth" that both men are obsessed with, in Tenet: A True Story About the Revolutionary Politics of Telling the Truth About Truth as Edited by Someone Who is Not Julian Assange in Any Literal Sense.