Theatre review: Love, Love, Love

I imagine there's a hiatus coming up in my theatregoing and reviewing, thanks to a certain global situation targeting the Baby Boomers, but in the meantime here's Mike Bartlett's own dig at that generation. After the Brexit result came in I predicted Love, Love, Love would be a play that kept coming back over the years, and here it is as Rachel O'Riordan's second directing gig in her inaugural Lyric Hammersmith season. It follows Sandra (Rachael Stirling) and Kenneth (Nicholas Burns) from first meeting to happy ending - but every chapter in their story has collateral damage they've become uncannily adept at ignoring. The first of these is Kenneth's brother Henry (Patrick Knowles,) whom Sandra has just started dating at the beginning of the play; older by only four years he appears to be from an entirely different generation.

Theatre review: Measure for Measure(Donmar Warehouse)

During Josie Rourke’s tenure the Donald and Margot Warehouse’s Shakespeare productions have tended to confound expectations – whether it be the expectation that Julius Caesar be played by a man or Coriolanus by someone with range – and for what is likely to be her last Shakespeare there she’s given it a new twist. Another of the original “Problem Plays,” Measure for Measure is a story full of hypocrisy, right from the start as the Duke of Vienna (Nicholas Burns) announces that he’ll be taking a sabbatical and leaving the city in the hands of his strict deputy. Vienna has draconian morality laws that the Duke’s let lapse during his rule; he wants to enforce them again, but doesn’t want to be seen as the bad guy so leaves it up to the deputy to bring terror not only to the city’s red light districts but even to anyone who has pre-marital sex – Claudio (Sule Rimi) has got his girlfriend pregnant and the strict word of the law demands his execution.

Theatre review: Young Marx

Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr finally unveil what they've been working on since they left the National - the Bridge Theatre, billed as the first new-built commerical theatre in London in 80 years, with a promotional drive that seems to focus much more on baked goods than you would usually expect (they're trying to make interval madeleines A Thing.) Who knows how many unused shells of theatres are knocking around London basements at the moment thanks to the tax breaks luxury developments get for including a community arts space* - Hytner and Starr picked one next to Tower Bridge to occupy and flesh out, with what looks like a very effective design: Front-of-House is a bit Expensive Hotel but the auditorium has a touch of the RST about it, with three galleries above the stalls, and what look like good sightlines from most seats and a comparatively intimate feel. The opening three productions are designed to showcase the three possible seating configurations, starting with end-on.

Theatre review: Macbeth (Young Vic)

When Carrie Cracknell directed Medea at the National, Lucy Guerin's choreography was singled out as a major part of the production's atmosphere. Now, for Macbeth at the Young Vic, Cracknell and Guerin share equal directing credit as they attempt to fully integrate dance with Shakespeare's text. Macbeth (John Heffernan) is the star general in Duncan's (Nicholas Burns) Scottish army, but an encounter with three witches feeds his ambitions and makes him impatient to take the throne himself. He and his wife (Anna Maxwell Martin) goad each other into a plot to kill Duncan in his sleep and take his kingdom. They succeed, but as with so many Shakespearean kings he finds power hard to wield. Soon he's arranging more murders to cover up the way he came to the throne, and to quash any new threats.

Stage-to-screen review: The Vote

The second James Graham political play to have been running in London concurrently with The Angry Brigade, tickets for The Vote at the Donmar Warehouse were allocated by ballot, so although I applied I wasn't able to see the show at the theatre. I guess that's democracy for you, Donmar members didn't get preferential treatment, and neither did critics - it's just a fortuitous coincidence that all the newspaper critics' applications successfully got them tickets for the same night. And just in time to give it a boost for its showing on More4 on election night! That was the alternative option for those of us who didn't get to see the starry cast in the flesh, a live broadcast at the exact time that the show is set: 8:30 to 10pm, the final 90 minutes of voting in a Lambeth polling station. It's a marginal seat and, with the election looking like a closer-run thing than it actually turned out to be, every vote could be crucial.

Theatre review: Breeders

Opening a new season for young producers at the St James Theatre is Ben Ockrent's new play Breeders, an appealing sitcom with a strong comedy cast. Self-help book writer Andrea (Tamzin Outhwaite) and family lawyer Caroline (Angela Griffin) are a well-off lesbian couple who've recently got married and bought a large fixer-upper house together, but with their biological clocks ticking they're starting to wish for a family to fill it with. Andrea's dream is that they can have what a straight couple does, a baby that shares both parents' DNA, but the only way to do that is for her brother Jimmy (Nicholas Burns) to be the sperm donor for Caro's pregnancy. He says yes, but when they can't agree over what his legal rights to the child will be the plan changes: He and his girlfriend Sharon (Jemima Rooper) will move in with the couple and they'll all raise the child together.

Theatre review: The Magistrate

Things haven't gone smoothly this year for the National's annual Christmas extravaganza: After taking the unusual, for them, step of putting tickets for The Count of Monte Cristo on sale nearly six months in advance, they then had to refund them when they decided the adaptation wasn't ready. Instead Timothy Sheader, who had been down to direct that show, was put in charge of a starry production of Arthur Wing Pinero's Victorian farce The Magistrate. When widow Agatha (Nancy Carroll) met the amiable magistrate Posket (John Lithgow) on holiday, she knocked five years off her age to seem more marriageable. Now they're married and back in London, Agatha's spotted a flaw in her plan: Her son Cis (Joshua McGuire,) whose fondness for port, cigarettes and groping his piano teacher (Sarah Ovens) seems a bit mature for a 14-year-old. That's because to make her lie work, his mother also knocked five years of Cis' age, and he's really 19.

Theatre review: The Recruiting Officer

Captain Plume has been courting Silvia for some time, and Mr Worthy has been courting her cousin Melinda. But when both women come into unexpected fortunes, the men find themselves socially inferior to their prospective brides, and so no longer considered worthy of marrying them. Josie Rourke opens her first season at the Donmar Warehouse with George Farquhar's 18th Century comedy set in Shrewsbury, where Plume (Tobias Menzies) is on the hunt for more soldiers for the endless wars in Europe. Together with his recruiting officer Sergeant Kite (Mackenzie Crook) he's more than willing to use underhand tactics to get the local men to sign up.