Theatre review: Our Country's Good

After a few years away from its ubiquity about a decade ago, I'm going to guess Our Country's Good is back on the A'Level syllabus as it makes a return to the stage (and the school groups in the audience seemed very familiar with the play as well.) For Rachel O'Riordan's production at the Lyric Hammersmith Timberlake Wertenbaker has made some revisions to her most famous play, apparently to provide a more authentic voice to the speeches by the play's sole Australian First Nations character, who casts a detached, quizzical eye over the hordes of British men and women who've come off a fleet of ships. In addition to these text revisions, which I guess are the translations into Aboriginal dialect that pepper the speeches, instead of a man in traditional dress Killara (Naarah) is now a woman in modern clothes, witnessing the soldiers and convicts arriving in what will eventually become Sydney in the late 18th century.

Theatre review: Minority Report

I still have strong memories of the Lyric Hammersmith successfully translating science fiction to the stage with the striking Solaris a few years ago, so while it's a different creative team tackling Philip K. Dick, who inspired a number of the most successful sci-fi movies of all time, I was still optimistic that a venue willing to give the genre a chance would be a good choice to continue the experiment. Minority Report is quite a different proposition from the moody spookiness of Solaris, with the added challenges of a lot of action scenes, and Max Webster's production deals with them with varied - though mostly positive - results. But first, how to ensure future dystopia has the requisite dark cityscape of permanent rain? Adaptor David Haig has solved it by setting the story in London, so the view on stage isn't too different from the one out of the windows.

Theatre review: The Deep Blue Sea

Quite a major case of déjà vu for me tonight, as although Carrie Cracknell's production for the National is the first time I've seen Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, it was only two weeks ago that I saw Kenny Morgan, based on the true events that inspired it. And as it turns out, Mike Poulton's play had followed Rattigan's template very closely. The Deep Blue Sea opens with Hester Collyer (Helen McCrory) lying unconscious in front of her gas fire, having attempted suicide. Her neighbour Philip (Hubert Burton) smells the gas, and with the help of landlady Mrs Elton (Marion Bailey) gets into the flat and revives her. This scandal causes another one to be revealed: The man she lives with, and who everyone assumed was Hester's husband, is in fact her lover, and she's actually still married to someone else.

Theatre review: Treasure Island (National Theatre)

The National Theatre goes back to the classics for this year's big family show, with a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Orphaned Jim Hawkins (Patsy Ferran) and her Grandma (Gillian Hanna) run an inn whose only regular customer is Bill Bones (Aidan Kelly,) an ex-pirate raving about his fear of a one-legged man. When Bones is killed with all his bills still unpaid, they take their payment from his chest, where they also find a treasure map. The excitable Squire Trelawney (Nick Fletcher) finds out about Treasure Island and is soon leading Jim and Dr Livesey (Helena Lymbery) to Bristol to find a ship and crew to take them there. Jim remains wary of the one-legged man Bones warned her of, but after all many men lose a leg at sea, the mythical pirate captain couldn't possibly be her new friend, the ship's cook Long John Silver (Arthur Darvill.)

Theatre review: Public Enemy

The Young Vic's reinvention of classic texts continues, and after a big hit with A Doll's House last year they turn to Ibsen again. This time though it's the team behind Government Inspector tackling the play, and as that was one of the rare shows I've left at the interval (and I wasn't even the only theatre blogger to do so) I approached Public Enemy with a bit of trepidation. Miriam Buether has once again lent a psychedelic edge to the design, fitting in with the 1970s feel director Richard Jones brings to David Harrower's translation. It's another of the wide, shallow stages Buether favours at the Young Vic, and it's not great for sightlines if you're at the front and particularly the edge of a row like we were - cricked necks are to be had. The general update from the 1880s to the 1970s works, though, and takes Ibsen's characters out of the familiar setting.

Theatre review: The Shawl

The Young Vic's tiny Clare studio seems to be becoming the home for the winners of directing awards: Having already played host to the JMK winner, we now get the Genesis Future Director's Award winner, Ben Kidd. He brings an interesting dynamic to The Shawl, the short 1985 play in which David Mamet returns to his recurring theme of con-artists, this time looking at mediums whose comforting messages from the dead are entirely bogus - or are they? Kidd's production opens with a beautifully spooky touch: Merle Hensel's design sees chairs bolted down in a fairly haphazard-seeming in-the-round configuration, and as the audience take their seats a security camera's live images are shown on a number of TV screens, scattered around the cardboard boxes that line the walls. But when the play starts and Miss A (Denise Gough) enters, with some trepidation, for her first consultation with a psychic, the TV screens show her entering a deserted room, as if the audience are now spirits the cameras can't pick up.