Theatre review: A Good House

If the Royal Court Upstairs has a history of making you feel very nervous about any play featuring a baby, the main Downstairs theatre can give you déjà vu with a satire on race relations set firmly in the suburbs, whose communities appear happily integrated on a surface that's easily scratched away. If Clybourne Park had over fifty years of history to play with, Amy Jephta's A Good House deals with a place where the very first roots of racial integration are only three decades old: The aptly-named Stillwater is an affluent new-build suburb of Johannesburg, where Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) were early buyers, and two years on remain the only black residents. Meanwhile, yoga instructor Jess (Robyn Rainsford) and her husband Andrew (Kai Luke Brummer) moved in a couple of months ago, paying a much higher price which means all their money is now tied up in the house.

Stage-to-screen review: Henry VI Part 1Open Rehearsal Project (RSC)

The Phantom Menace of Shakespeare's Plantagenet history cycle, Henry VI Part 1 is the unloved prequel that seems to exist mainly to cause a headache for companies like the RSC and Globe: There's an expectation that they'll make their way through the entire canon every decade or so, but a couple of the plays feel like a hell of a lot of effort and expense for a show nobody will actually want to come and see. As the least popular part of an extended sequence of plays Henry VI Part 1 suffers the most from this - I've only seen it live in its own right once - and theatres tend to go for some variation of not actually staging it and saying they did. Usually this involves merging it into the other two Henry VI plays, like the Swanamaker's last attempt did particularly ruthlessly, but the RSC chose instead to make a virtue out of necessity and knock this one out as a lockdown project online: Gregory Doran and Owen Horsley directed a professional cast in rehearsals last summer, which were live-streamed for anyone interested in seeing the company's rehearsal process.

Re-review: Hamlet (RSC tour)

Hamlet is a play so popular and frequently produced that I've seen it more times than any other, so it's not often I feel the need to revisit a particular production. Simon Godwin's 2016 Stratford version was one I did want to see again, and I was far from the only person to be disappointed and annoyed when it was the only show in that RSC season not to transfer to London. The reason given was that the cast was unavailable, but as many of them were in other shows in the season, including Paapa Essiedu in the lead, there would probably only have been the need for a handful of roles to be recast. Well that omission has finally been rectified, as Essiedu returns to lead a tour of this relocation of mediaeval Denmark to modern Africa, with some of the original cast also joining him; more recastings have had to be made than would probably be the case if it had transferred straight away, but it's not in the least to the detriment of the production.

Theatre review: The Convert

A couple of past successes will be coming back for Christopher Haydon's final season of programming at the Gate, and after the success of Eclipsed* he brings back writer Danai Gurira for an unusually long and epic play by the venue's usual standards: The Convert is set in late Victorian Rhodesia, where both Catholic and Protestant churches have made slight inroads in converting the locals. Taken from his family as a child, Chilford (Stefan Adegbola) is a devout Catholic, helping the local priest and frustrated by the fact that an old rival has been accepted to the priesthood, as he himself had hoped to be the first black African priest. He's never managed to get anyone quite as enthusiastic about the white men's religion as he is - his housekeeper Mai Tamba (Clare Perkins) goes through the motions but also performs good luck magic when he's not looking. But her niece Jekesai (Mimi Ndiweni) is a different story.

Theatre review: Midsummer Mischief Programme A - The Ant and the Cicada andRevolt. She Said. Revolt again

As a companion piece to the RSC's "Roaring Girls" season, Erica Whyman commissioned a quartet of short plays by female playwrights on the theme of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's quote "Well-behaved women seldom make history." Collectively called Midsummer Mischief, their run in Dame Stratford-upon-Avon is followed by a brief showcase at the Royal Court Upstairs. The one-acters are presented in two double bills, each only getting two performances here, and Programme A was the only one I could fit into my schedule; but it was the one I wanted to see more as the writers were more promising: The double bill opens with Timberlake Wertenbaker and her take on a modern Greek tragedy. Of course, classic Greek tragedy is a specialty of Wertenbaker's, and its themes percolate through The Ant and the Cicada (a reference to the Aesop fable commonly known as The Ant and the Grasshopper.)