Theatre review: Cymbeline(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

If Love's Labour's Lost can feel like the young Shakespeare workshopping setpieces he would perfect later in his career, Cymbeline could be the older playwright collecting every mad idea he couldn't fit into an earlier play, then throwing them all together to see what happens. The story of Roman Britain sees Princess Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks) separated from her exiled spouse, to be reunited only after a deranged fairytale quest that includes a man hiding in a trunk, a health tonic that's actually a deadly poison that's actually just a sleeping draught, meeting a pair of siblings she never knew existed, and a headless corpse largely played for laughs. The Swanamaker's latest take on the play gender-flips a lot of characters including the titular king; I understand the desire for a powerful female leader figure, but it feels a bit of a pyrrhic victory for that leader to struggle to make an impression because she spends the whole play on more sedatives than a 1980s soap opera housewife.

Theatre review: The New Real

My relationship with David Edgar's plays has been mixed: I think my still-strong memories of enjoying Pentecost in the '90s make me always want to give his new work a try, but the RSC's most-commissioned modern writer was also responsible for the notoriously dreary Written on the Heart, and after last week's meh Here In America I felt a bit of trepidation towards the second of his premieres this autumn. The New Real is also described by the blurb as both "epic" and "panoramic," so they're really making sure you know it's going to be long. Still, my first show at Stratford's The Other Place since it was serving as The Courtyard twelve years ago turns out to be flawed, but worth checking out. Edgar returns to Eastern Europe and an unnamed former Soviet state, in a story spanning the last 22 years and looking at the question that has been worrying many political playwrights: How did politics move so far to the Right and so far from reality in that time?

Theatre review: Meetings

Trinidadian couple Jean and Hugh are living the 1980s dream: Chain-smoking Jean (Martina Laird) has never wanted to be a domestic goddess, instead becoming a successful businesswoman who's just taken on a contract marketing a new American cigarette brand to the island's poor villagers. Hugh (Kevin N Golding) has a plumbing supplies company, and has struck a deal to sell pipes at inflated prices to a government crony. Yes, there might have been the odd topical connection that helped put Mustapha Matura's Meetings on the list of potential revivals for this year's JMK Award. But while Jean doesn't seem to want anything to change, Hugh is on the verge of a midlife crisis prompted by food: With no time or inclination to cook or eat together, the couple have largely depended on restaurants and takeaways.

Theatre review: King Hedley II

Part of Nadia Fall's mission statement for her inaugural season at Theatre Royal Stratford East was to put the venue back on the theatrical map, and on the one hand a powerful play by a respected American playwright starring a much-loved British actor is a great way to do that, and the theatre seemed nearly full tonight. On the other hand keeping the start time at 7:30 for a three-and-a-half hour play does make it a pretty off-putting prospect for anyone who doesn't live locally, and faces a long journey home at 11pm. King Hedley II turns out to be worth the hassle, just about, but it's a heavy-going evening. This takes me up to 4 plays in August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, the second I've seen to star Sir Leonard of Henry, and is the 1980s entry in his ten-play sequence about black life in America in every decade of the 20th Century.

Theatre review: All's Well That Ends Well (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Caroline Byrne would appear to be the director the Globe turns to when they've got a problem play that needs solving; she previously had to deal with the alleged comedy of The Taming of the Shrew, and now comes indooors to the Swanamaker for a play that belies its title of All's Well That Ends Well. Byrne's production includes the unusual credit of Ben Ormerod as "candle consultant," and perhaps the consultation was over how few candles they could get away with in the playhouse - only two of the chandeliers get lit, and then only for a single scene, with a few small candelabras and handheld candles doing all the work of lighting the action. Fortunately things aren't so murky that it becomes difficult to see what's going on, but they are murky enough to take us into the slightly nightmarish world the play's two leads find themselves in.

Theatre review: Coriolanus (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Season director Angus Jackson returns for the fourth and last of the RSC's Roman plays, and although Coriolanus is set earlier than the other three, designer Robert Innes Hopkins eschews the togas of the middle two plays, to match the modern dress of Titus Andronicus. In fact this also starts with a rioting gang in hoodies, and since it will actually play first when they all transfer to London, it annoyed me a bit that it'll look there like Blanche McIntyre copied the idea. Fortunately there was less to annoy me about the rest of the production, in which Sope Dirisu takes on the least likeable of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Caius Martius, later given the title Coriolanus after one of his many military victories, is a one-man Roman army, raised as such by his batshit bloodthirsty mother Volumnia (Haydn Gwynne.)

Theatre review: Who Cares

Continuing the theme since Vicky Featherstone took over the Royal Court of having shows explode out of the usual boundaries of its auditoria, Michael Wynne's verbatim play Who Cares technically takes place in the Upstairs Theatre. But before it gets there Debbie Hannan, Lucy Morrison and Hamish Pirie's promenade production takes the audience from the rehearsal rooms and offices behind Sloane Square station, to the staircases and corridors backstage, and the area that's usually the lighting booth of the Upstairs Theatre. This is all in service of us hearing the stories of, for the most part, workers in the National Health Service, building up a picture both of the emotional connection that this country has to the NHS, and exactly how it's being changed by successive governments - particularly the "stealth privatisation" brought in by the current coalition.

Theatre review: The House That Will Not Stand

Carrying distinct echoes of The House of Bernarda Alba, Marcus Gardley's tragicomedy The House That Will Not Stand is, thankfully, possessed of a much lighter touch despite taking on issues every bit as troubling as Lorca. The setting is New Orleans in 1836, a place and time in American history when black rights - for a select few - were a reality, but one that was already being threatened by new laws. Most of the characters are "free colored women," but as Gardley's play explores, freedom may be illusory, just as there's more than one form of slavery. As the play starts, a wealthy white Louisiana man, Lazare (Paul Shelley,) has just died. Although he had a wife, he actually lived with his black mistress Beartrice (Martina Laird) and their daughters. As things stand, Beartrice is due to inherit the house, but she needs to do so quickly before the law changes. Meanwhile her daughters want to be allowed out of mourning to go to a ball and capture white men of their own before it's too late.

Theatre review: Moon on a Rainbow Shawl

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This review is of the final preview performance.

This year sees the 50th anniversary of Trinidad's independence, a milestone that probably prompted the National to revive Errol John's 1953 play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, a gently tragicomic look at 48 hours in the life of the island. Soutra Gilmour's set squeezes the road and three small shacks into a traverse in the Cottesloe, and it's their inhabitants that form the core of the play. Ephraim (Danny Sapani) sees getting away as the only route to happiness, and has secretly been planning to leave girlfriend Rosa (Jade Anouka) behind and set sail to Liverpool. The heart of the piece is Sophia (Martina Laird,) trying to look after her family despite her layabout husband Charlie (Jude Akuwudike.) Meanwhile prostitute Mavis (a scene-stealing Jenny Jules, tottering about in her high heels and kissing her teeth at the neighbours who look down on her) makes a living off the American soldiers and sailors (all played by cute Joshua McCord,) the US still keeping an eye on the area because it's got oil.