Theatre review: Henry V (RSC/RST)

A Henry V that doesn't feel horribly topical when a foreign war is launched to distract from a domestic crisis must be as rare as one that doesn't co-opt something from the Henry IV plays to build its world. Both themes are present together as 50% of the RSC's Artistic Director reunites with Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch: Tamara Harvey's production opens with Enoch's Hal mistaking his sleeping father for dead and prematurely taking the crown. It feels notable that he shoos away a servant as the old king (Valentine Hanson) admits his claim to the throne was tenuous, and then goes on to advise his son to solidify his own position by invading France. This becomes pretty much the whole plot of the play that follows, but Hal's statement that the weight of responsibility led Henry IV to his early grave turns out not to be as relevant to him.

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream(RSC/RST)

When a theatre decides when to schedule A Midsummer Night's Dream they tend to do so with a fairly literal approach to the title; if it shows up out of season that usually means we're in for one of the "darker and edgier" takes that honestly believes it's the first production ever to notice the line "I wooed thee with my sword" and proceeds to apply it to every scene, Joe. So it's refreshing to see Eleanor Rhode's new RSC production - the last Shakespeare of Erica Whyman's interregnum period - open in a very different way: The lines about winning love with injury are still there, but their context feels a lot less personal. The Duke of Athens and Queen of the Amazons' wedding is definitely an arranged one made as part of a peace treaty, but both of them are pawns in this situation, and Bally Gill's sweetly awkward Theseus is clearly intimidated by Sirine Saba's businesslike Hippolyta.

Theatre review: Berlusconi

When I sent my list of upcoming theatre trips to the friends who usually accompany me, Phill said he didn't even need to look past the title of Berlusconi, the musical, to say yes. Ian and Jim both said they also wouldn't have needed to read the blurb to make a decision, but... for a different reason. Yes, this is one of those shows that really could have gone one of two ways, and Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan's musical about the disgraced former Prime Minister of Italy grabs every opportunity to choose the wrong one. Silvio Berlusconi (Sebastien Torkia) was a cruise-ship singer turned building magnate, turned media mogul, turned politician. The latter seems to have largely been an attempt to get political immunity from prosecution from innumerable cases of financial crime and corruption in his companies, but still resulted in three non-consecutive terms as PM.

Theatre review: The Angry Brigade

Although a new James Graham play is always worth a look, when The Angry Brigade premiered last year I decided against going all the way to Watford for it, taking the gamble that it would probably make it to London sooner or later. And so it has, playing a season at the Bush during the election, which feels appropriate: Even though it takes its story from 1971 and only tangentially features any politicians, the Britain the titular organisation live in has a lot in common with 2015. The Angry Brigade feels almost like two different plays: In the first act, we meet a specially-assembled police investigation team, led by the newly-promoted Smith (Mark Arends,) who's been given the task of finding a terrorist organisation who've sent threatening letters against the pillars of traditional society. A couple of their explosive devices have also been discovered, and it's only a matter of time before one of them goes off.

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Japes Too

Three quarters of the way through Simon Gray's In the Vale of Health sequence, and all I am is more strongly convinced that staging this quartet is an incredibly elaborate vanity project, and one created for the benefit of someone who isn't even alive to enjoy it. The original stand-alone play was Japes, about a ménage à trois that sees Anita (Laura Rees) married to Michael (Jamie Ballard) for decades while carrying on an on-off relationship with his younger brother Japes (Gethin Anthony.) Then there was Michael, a shorter piece which ditched the first act and retold the second from an ever-so-slightly different angle. And now there's the third (though written second) in Hampstead's series, Japes Too, which aims to follow the characters from the original play, but see how things might have turned out if certain details had been different.

Theatre review: Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse)

"Tom Hiddleston showering on stage." According to my blog stats, I've already been getting hits from people Googling that phrase long before I even saw the show. So there you go, at least now those people will actually find something for their troubles. Yes, Hiddles does take a shower on stage, although it's more like a quick splash. Calm down, he doesn't even take his trousers off, it's not like he's getting his Coriolanus bleached. He does also share a kiss with a man, but that's more of a quick peck on the lips than anything to get the Internet too moist in the gusset. But if these two headline-grabbing moments are nothing much to write home about, it's fortunately because they're throwaway elements of a solid production, as Josie Rourke tackles a simply staged but interesting Coriolanus.

Theatre review: The Sound of Heavy Rain

The casts of both Lungs and One Day When We Were Young come together for the final play in Paines Plough's Roundabout season at Shoreditch Town Hall, The Sound of Heavy Rain. Where the other two plays are intimate relationship stories, Penelope Skinner's contribution is a drily witty pastiche, relocating the hard-boiled detective tropes of film noir from LA to the rain-soaked streets of Soho. Dabrowski (Andrew Sheridan) is a PI who spends his nights drinking to get over being dumped, when the dowdy Maggie (Maia Alexander) arrives at his office with a case for him. Her best friend and flatmate has disappeared, and the detective sets off to find the glamorous cabaret singer Foxie O'Hara. But the further he gets into the case, the more Dabrowski starts to suspect that Foxie may never have even been real.

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.

Theatre review: The Recruiting Officer

Captain Plume has been courting Silvia for some time, and Mr Worthy has been courting her cousin Melinda. But when both women come into unexpected fortunes, the men find themselves socially inferior to their prospective brides, and so no longer considered worthy of marrying them. Josie Rourke opens her first season at the Donmar Warehouse with George Farquhar's 18th Century comedy set in Shrewsbury, where Plume (Tobias Menzies) is on the hunt for more soldiers for the endless wars in Europe. Together with his recruiting officer Sergeant Kite (Mackenzie Crook) he's more than willing to use underhand tactics to get the local men to sign up.