Theatre review: Romeo and Juliet(Shakespeare's Globe)

After Hamlet on the Titanic and Much Ado About WAGs, this spring's trio of super-high concept Shakespeare productions concludes with Romeo and Juliet: The Western. Although out of these three, Sean Holmes' production at the Globe is the one that engages the least with its high concept, right from the start when it becomes apparent that the cast will be using their own accents instead of going all-in to match the Wild West imagery. Paul Wills' design does fill the stage with cowboys and cowgirls, against a backdrop of swinging saloon doors - though apart from one ominous splash of blood it does all look rather new and clean in the town of Verona, where two families' feud has been a headache for the Sheriff (Dharmesh Patel) for many years. He finally concedes that he can't stop them attacking each other in private, but doing so in public will be on pain of death.

Theatre review: Julius Caesar(Icarus / Southwark Playhouse)

I wonder if Julius Caesar is another play that's currently on the syllabus, as Southwark Playhouse had a production from Lazarus Theatre Company scheduled which fell through; instead of cancelling, they replaced it with a completely different production of the same Shakespeare play from Icarus Theatre Collective, a company specialising in creative captioning who've previously presented Ionesco at the venue. Max Lewendel's production has apparently gone through extensive R&D, something I wish I could say was better reflected in what's ended up on stage in The Large. Instead we're in a dystopian future, one theoretically embedded in very modern concerns about AI and online mobs, but in design more obviously rooted in the kind of 1980s sci-fi that tried to remake Mad Max on a 30p budget.

Theatre review: The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare's Globe)

Sean Holmes liked a touch of European avant garde theatre when he was running the Lyric Hammersmith, and since coming to Shakespeare's Globe he's been responsible for some of the more eye-catching high-concept productions there, but this year he gets the tights and codpieces of the more "heritage" shows for The Comedy of Errors. There's also a hint of Les Misérables as the show opens, with flag-waving and singing about how great Ephesus is, and how they've fought back against the injustices done to them by Syracuse, with a hostile environment (/automatic death sentence) for any Syracusians who wash up on their shores. This is bad news for a number of the characters, but particularly Egeus (Paul Rider,) who's the only one to get caught. Egeus was shipwrecked while searching for his long-lost identical twin sons, and their identical twin servants.

Theatre review: Hex

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: All the remaining run of Hex has been reclassified as previews.

My most-cancelled show of the Christmas season - I had to reschedule it twice - the National Theatre's new musical Hex has missed so much of its planned run that what's left is now being considered a preview, prior to it returning for what they'll be hoping will be a more successful second try at the end of the year. This is probably for the best - I'd hazard a guess that composer Jim Fortune, book writer Tanya Ronder and lyricist/director Rufus Norris will be giving it a few tweaks between now and then. Whether the promising premise can actually be converted into a hit is another story. Hex applies to Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty the central conceits of two of the most popular fairytale musicals of all time: The revisionist take on a character usually seen as the villain, most famously used in Wicked, and the second act exploring what happens after the Happy-Ever-After, as used in Into the Woods.

Theatre review: The Visit, or,The Old Lady Comes To Call

After Angels in America was a transatlantic success for the National Theatre twice over, it's no surprise if they're keen to bring Tony Kushner back to their stages; the Olivier this time, and instead of an original story it's for an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's obscure 1956 play The Visit, or, The Old Lady Comes To Call; but one thing that definitely hasn't changed is Kushner's determination that, once he's got the audience through the doors, he's going to keep them there as long as humanly possible. And while it doesn't fly quite as far into the realms of magic realism as his most famous work, this play - essentially an extended fable on debt of many different kinds - is full of oddities. It takes place over a few days in 1955 in the town of Slurry, New York State, once a manufacturing hub but now collapsing, its various businesses sold up to unseen buyers and liquidated years ago, and now reduced to selling the church bells for scrap metal.