Theatre review: Stage Kiss

Sarah Ruhl takes a decidedly metatheatrical stab at romantic comedy, a genre that over the years has seen many stage and screen couples emulate their characters' relationships in real life. Whether the stars actually managed to recreate their happy endings, though, has never been guaranteed. The unnamed leads in Stage Kiss are actors cast in a regional revival of a forgotten 1930s romance; only when She (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) and He (Patrick Kennedy) arrive for the first day of rehearsals do they discover they've been cast opposite someone they had a tempestuous relationship with two decades earlier. As they go through weeks of rehearsal and performances, kissing each other dozens of times a day, the lines between play and reality start to get blurred.

Theatre review: anthropology

After a quiet summer Hampstead Theatre kicks off its new season with anthropology, Lauren Gunderson's play that takes the very topical subject of AI and... well, it's not particularly clear what, if anything, it does with it. Angie (Dakota Blue Richards) has been missing, presumed dead, since she disappeared at college a couple of years ago in a suspected kidnapping. Her sister Merrill (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) is a Something Something Computers, who is processing the loss by creating an algorithm that's been fed all the digital information Angie left behind, and as the play begins she switches it on for the first time, finding that - apart from being a bit nicer than the real thing - the digital version is an uncannily accurate representation that seems to know her sister in ways even her programmer doesn't.

Theatre review: A Very Expensive Poison

It's seven years since Lucy Prebble has written for the stage, a self-imposed exile because - as the playwright herself admitted when that play got adapted for radio - she was so happy with The Effect that she genuinely didn't believe she'd ever match it. Well, she's finally braved the weight of her own high expectations to debut A Very Expensive Poison at the Old Vic, and instead of taking similar ground to her last play it instead goes back to ripping its story from the headlines like her earlier hit ENRON. It also uses something like that play's genre-hopping, metatheatrical style, although director John Crowley can't quite bring the flair of a Rupert Goold to it. Based on Luke Harding's book of the same name, A Very Expensive Poison follows the murder of Russian whistle-blower Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium 210, a radioactive substance so rare it could be traced back to the precise nuclear plant where it was produced; and despite this the trouble Litvinenko's widow Marina had getting anyone in power to point the finger at the most obvious suspect.

Theatre review: The Wasp

Although they came from very different backgrounds, Carla and Heather were good friends at primary school. But as they got into their teens, Carla started to resent her friend's much more privileged home life. Joining up with a new group of girls, they made Heather the most frequent target of their bullying, which ended up taking a particularly vicious turn. A couple of decades on, their statuses in life aren't too different to how they were as children: Heather (Sinéad Matthews) is well-off, married but childless. After years without any contact she's found her old friend/enemy on Facebook. She invites Carla (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) for coffee, to make her a proposition. Poor, frustrated and pregnant with her fifth child, Carla assumes Heather wants to hire her as a surrogate.

Theatre review: Strangers on a Train

"Strangers on a train, exchanging glances. Wondering, on a train, what were the chances..." Actually I think I might have entirely the wrong song stuck in my head. Laurence Fox and Jack Huston certainly don't end up sharing love before the night is through, although given the play opens with the latter getting up close to the former before inviting him back to his private cabin to ply him with alcohol, it does look on the cards for a bit. Guy Haynes (Fox) is an architect with a wife who won't grant him the divorce he wants, Charles Bruno (Huston) a drunken son of millionaires, who'd quite like to see his father dead so he can get his hands on the cash. Bruno proposes that the two murder each other's nemeses, providing not only an alibi but also no known connection to the killer. Guy dismisses the man as a crank but soon finds himself with a dead ex-wife, and Bruno demanding he keep his end of the bargain.