Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

A couple of years ago Holly Race Roughan directed a Henry V in the Swanamaker that impressively reinvented the bombastic history play as a chilling tragedy, so I was willing to give her return to the venue a chance, despite it being advertised as the hoariest of all Shakespearean clichés - and the one every director who's ever tackled the play seems convinced they're the first ever to spot: The dark underside of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Co-directed by Naeem Hayat, this is the story of an Athens ruled by Michael Marcus' drunken bully Theseus, who's forcing the defeated Amazon queen to marry him; at the start, he and Hippolyta (Hedydd Dylan) are still trying to kill each other as they plan their wedding. When a young woman, Hermia (Tiwa Lade) petitions Theseus to be allowed to marry the man she loves, she's instead given an ultimatum to accept her father's choice, or be executed.

Theatre review: Why Am I So Single?

Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss' SIX was very much an outlier in how modern musical theatre hits tend to be made: A small-scale musical written at university and taken to Edinburgh, it currently stands as a long-runner both in the West End and on Broadway, with its fanbase making its songs a streaming juggernaut as well. So with the team a firmly established one, launching a new musical straight into the West End comes with very different expectations, and surely the most high profile theatrical case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome in many years. So the premise of follow-up Why Am I So Single Question Mark feels audacious in just how basic it is: A pair of characters directly and explicitly modelled on Marlow & Moss have a case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome, and decide to base their next musical on their daily lives.

Theatre review: As You Like It (Shakespeare's Globe)

Continuing to suggest Michelle Terry's vision for Shakespeare's Globe is as the most joyously queer theatre in That London, and tying that into the gender-bending embedded in many of Shakespeare's plays, the 2023 summer season closes as it opened, with a production largely cast with LGBTQ+ performers in roles that don't necessarily match their pronouns. Ellen McDougall's As You Like It goes one step further by making its queerness an integral part of how it divides the play's two very different worlds. We begin in the monochrome court of Duke Frederick (Dale Rapley,) who usurped his position from his own brother, whom he banished to the forest. But he allowed his niece Rosalind (Nina Bowers) to remain, as she was so close to his daughter Celia (Macy-Jacob Seelochan.) But a wrestling competition reminds him that his brother's former allies are still around.

Theatre review: Sound of the Underground

Defying easy categorisation, Sound of the Underground, created by writer Travis Alabanza and director Debbie Hannan, mixes scripted theatre with drag cabaret on the Royal Court's main stage. Alabanza has brought together eight drag performers from the underground club scene to throw together a messy evening - but one whose underlying concerns are clear. CHIYO, Lilly SnatchDragon, Ms Sharon Le Grand, Mwice Kavindele as Sadie Sinner The Songbird, Rhys Hollis as Rhys’ Pieces, Sue Gives A Fuck and Wet Mess begin by introducing themselves. The show has factored in the fact that Tammy Reynolds as Midgitte Bardot's disabilities will sometimes mean they can't appear, so at some performances, like tonight, there's a stand-in: Namely their pre-recorded dialogue and a cardboard cut-out.

Theatre review: The P Word

Waleed Akhtar's two-hander at the Bush is about gay Pakistani men in their thirties, so the title The P Word could refer to a couple of different slurs; they get called both of them over the course of 90 minutes although it's the racially-charged one which features more, and which at times becomes a bone of contention between the pair. Akhtar himself plays Bilal, a second-generation British Muslim whose parents theoretically accept his sexuality, but with a level of tutting and undisguised hope that it might be a "phase" after all, that's left the family relationship sour. It's fractious, but it's a level of family peace asylum seeker Zafar (Esh Alladi) could only dream of: He's fled Pakistan in secret after his father discovered his sexuality and threatened to kill him. He's got connections in the army and the threat's no idle one: He did murder Zafar's boyfriend when he caught them together.

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: King John (RSC / Swan)

In a theatrical landscape experimenting excitedly with gender-flipped, gender-blind and gender-neutral casting, it's good for a company to find its own niche, although the RSC's take seems to be an eccentric one: Casting women in male title roles, but largely going with the ones male actors weren't in any particular hurry to play in the first place. So a couple of years ago there was a female Cymbeline, and now the unloved - both in-universe and within the canon - King John, as Rosie Sheehy takes the nominal lead in Eleanor Rhode's production. John - the gender-flipped characters are largely given dresses in Max Johns' design but the pronouns stick to what Shakespeare wrote - has inherited the throne from his much more popular brother Richard the Lionheart, along with the usual convoluted politics with England and France fighting over claims to each other's kingdom.

Theatre review: The Half God of Rainfall

Inua Ellams scored his biggest hit to date by keeping things very much down to earth for his Barber Shop Chronicles, but for his follow-up he returns to more mythical storytelling with a vengeance: The Half God of Rainfall mixes Greek and Nigerian mythology with the more modern deities of professional sports. Modupe (Rakie Ayola) was high priestess to a river goddess and under her protection, but the Yoruba gods end up in a war with the Olympians, seemingly for no other reason than the fact that they're gods, and fight is what gods do. The Greeks win and Modupe is claimed as one of Zeus' spoils; he impregnates her and her demigod son is a baby who causes floods when he cries. When he's older Demi (Kwami Odoom) makes it rain in a more metaphorical way, as a star basketball player whose talent begins to earn him adoring fans.

Theatre review: Utility

Emily Schwend's Utility concludes another successful season at the Orange Tree, albeit one that's felt more quietly consistent than full of explosive hits. This, too, is in the same vein, an American kitchen sink drama about a woman just about keeping her head above water. The play starts with Amber (Robyn Addison) tentatively agreeing to let her husband Chris (Robert Lonsdale) move back in with her and their kids after a separation. It's implied, if never explicitly stated, that there was another woman, but in any case this doesn't seem to be what she's worried about: He's charming and well-meaning, but Chris is also unreliable and can barely seem to manage a couple of shifts at work every week, so Amber feels he'll end up being just another mouth to feed as she works two jobs. This week she's also got to worry about preparing an eighth birthday party for her daughter.

Theatre review: Yellowman

There are plenty of stories about people whose fates are sealed by the colour of their skin, but Dael Orlandersmith offers one where every tiny difference in pigmentation seems to have a specific, unavoidable path attached to it. As part of a Genesis Award Nancy Medina directs a revival of 2002 play Yellowman, which is part love story, part memoir, but overwhelmingly about prejudice and class distinctions based on skin tone within the black community. Eugene and Alma both grew up in South Carolina, each of them with one parent darker-skinned than the other. Eugene (Christopher Colquhoun) has taken after his lighter-skinned mother and so is a colour referred to (usually with some resentment) as “high yellow-red;” Alma (Nicola Hughes) also looks like her mother, which means she’s much darker and has to put up with a lifelong tirade from her alcoholic mother about how fat, ugly and black she is.