Theatre review: Game of Thrones: The Mad King

In the latest attempt to plug the Les Mis-shaped hole in their budget the RSC have taken a break from Celebrity Antisemite Roal Dahl and moved on to Celebrity Pirate George Arrr! Arrr! Martin, and his A Song of Ice and Fire saga. And Stratford-upon-Avon seems an apt enough home for a story conceived as a fantasy version of the Wars of the Roses since Shakespeare wrote eight* plays about them. And with roughly the same amount of concern for historical accuracy. Game of Thrones Colon The Mad King is the most immediate prequel to the original novels and Game of Thrones TV series yet, and fleshes out events known from the stories but not previously told in this much detail. And there's... certainly no shortage of detail in a play with a cast bigger than some West End musicals and a running time that just scrapes in under the four-hour mark.

Theatre review: Teeth'N'Smiles

The ultimate accolade shouldn't be a gold record, it should be a golden hypodermic. Parklife!

David Hare's play with songs Teeth Apostrophe N Apostrophe Smiles, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1975, is set six years earlier in 1969, when disillusionment with rock music and the counterculture it spearheaded was starting to set in. Maggie Frisby and The Skins are a once-popular group on its last legs, doing tours around UK universities that barely cover their expenses - Rebecca Lucy Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem plays vocalist Maggie, with Michael Abubakar, Bill Caple, Samuel Jordan, Jojo Macari and Noah Weatherby as a band at various levels of frustration at the way their careers have turned out. Maggie is a former heroin addict, but while we're given no reason to doubt that she's given that up, she's still unapologetically and indisputably an alcoholic who may or may not perform on any given night - it's the shows she's really looking forward to that the band know to be most worried about.

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: Three Sisters

Last winter season saw the Swanamaker take a successful first crack at Ibsen; this year, and in the annual onstage appearance by the Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe adds Chekhov to the repertory. In a remote part of Russia the titular Three Sisters live in the house their father bought when he was appointed commander of the resident military garrison. A year after his death, his children are still there, talking about moving back to Moscow but tied to the area by a few circumstances. Over the next five years, instead of freeing themselves from them, they'll end up with ever more reasons they can't escape the depressing small town they only ever thought was a stopgap. Olga is the eldest, the schoolteacher who has little love for the job and certainly doesn't see it as a career she'll progress in.

Theatre review: The Tragedy of Macbeth (Almeida)

Yaël Farber has in the past few years added herself to a fairly exclusive club, considering how undiscerning my theatre bookings can seem: Creatives who are widely lauded but I've never seen the appeal of, to the point that I eventually decided just to skip their future work altogether. This is inevitably a rule I keep finding exceptions for, and in a year that's been short of major event theatre for obvious reasons, her new take on The Tragedy of Macbeth has, thanks to the London stage debut of Saoirse Ronan (I don't watch many films but I'm assured she's a Famous,) become such a hot ticket that the Almeida introduced a Byzantine new booking process especially for it. It also doesn't seem quite as risky a booking as some - one of my problems with Farber is the lack of any discernible sense of humour, and that's not often much of an issue where this play's concerned. James McArdle plays Macbeth, the Scottish warrior lord whose prowess in battle sees him promoted by King Duncan (William Gaunt).

Theatre review: The Whip

It's been a lacklustre Swan season so while its final production, Juliet Gilkes Romero's The Whip, isn't without flaws I still found it the strongest offering. The title comes from the nominal lead's position, as Alexander Boyd (Richard Clothier) is the Chief Whip for the ruling Whig party in the early 1830s, but as the issue that defines his time in Parliament is the abolition of slavery in British colonies the title inevitably has a much more sinister double meaning. Boyd's initial mission is actually the reform of child labour in British factories, but he's diverted onto the abolition bill that's been dragging through Parliament for years. Slavery might never have been legal in the UK itself but the Empire's wealth comes from allowing it to continue in its colonies, and the West Indies are its last bastion. Finalising a deal hasn't been easy because too many politicians have a personal interest: Boyd is chosen to champion the cause as one of the few MPs not to be a slaveowner himself.

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.