Theatre review: The Threepenny Opera

Prepare for shares in eyeliner to soar as Rufus Norris brings Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's satirical musical The Threepenny Opera to the Olivier with a new translation of the book and lyrics by Simon Stephens, and Rory Kinnear at the head of a real luxury cast. Mack the Knife (Kinnear) is a violent East End criminal, who's managed to avoid punishment so far through a combination of Chief Inspector Tiger Brown (Peter De Jersey) being an old army buddy of his, and the fact that Mack has an incriminating dossier that could cause the new King of England some embarrassment. But his downfall might well come not from his crimes but from his marriage: His new wife is the seemingly timid accountant Polly (Rosalie Craig,) who he hopes can use her organisational skills to help build his criminal empire up.

Theatre review: Everyman

If the first show programmed by the new Artistic Director was anything to go by, we would have been in for a dull time at the National Theatre over the next few years, but we've got something more interesting - if eccentrically so - in the first play Rufus Norris has taken on to direct himself. It may be a new era but Norris goes right back to the beginning of extant English theatre with the mediaeval morality play Everyman, "Ev" to his friends in this new version by Carol Ann Duffy. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Ev, whom we first meet tumbling through the air to the stage in slow motion, in what could be a symbolic Fall of Man but turns out to be somewhat more prosaic: An accident after a coke-fuelled 40th birthday party. Death (Dermot Crowley) arrives to tell him his time is up, and soon Ev will need to make a reckoning with God (Kate Duchêne,) and justify the way he's lived his life.

Theatre review: The Winter's Tale (RSC / RST & tour)

Lucy Bailey's history at the RSC seems mainly to involve directing some of my least favourite Shakespeare plays. And Jo Stone-Fewings', for some reason, always requires him to lounge barefoot on piles of scatter cushions. Both memes are present and correct as Stone-Fewings plays Leontes in Bailey's production of The Winter's Tale. Leontes is the King of Sicilia, and has been friends with Bohemian King Polixenes since childhood. Despite years of happy marriage to Hermione, Leontes is gripped by am irrational jealousy (here strongly implied to be the result of a sudden mental illness) that his wife and best friend are having an affair, and that the baby Hermione is carrying is Polixenes'. The latter is warned in time to escape, but the Queen is subjected to a humiliating show-trial, and when Leontes' doubts are proven groundless he's punished by a series of personal disasters - which only the play's notorious lurch into magical pastoral fairytale can make better.

Re-review: London Road

London Road topped my list of favourite theatre of 2011, and I was far from a lone voice: So popular was Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork's verbatim musical that the National Theatre has brought it back, moving it from the smallest auditorium to the largest as one of this year's Travelex £12 shows. Despite seeing it twice in the Cottesloe I couldn't resist one more visit in its new home, and this time brought my mum along for the ride. In 2006, in the run-up to Christmas, five prostitutes were murdered in Ipswich. Alecky Blythe, who creates her plays by editing together real-life audio interviews, went to Ipswich to speak to the residents as the events were unfolding, and then again in the subsequent couple of years to find out how they were coping with the fallout both from the killings themselves, and the media circus that came to town.

Theatre review: The Taming of the Shrew (RSC / RST & tour)

The last time the RSC tried their hand at a bit of shrew-taming, they went for a literal approach that didn't sugarcoat the misogyny in Shakespeare's play. Which is all very powerful and thought-provoking, but unless you're an actual misogynist it's also rather unpleasant. Lucy Bailey's The Taming of the Shrew is a much less brutal, more ambiguous telling of the story that tries to find the soulmates in Petruchio and Katherina, but remains problematic.

Proving once again that the deep thrust stage doesn't mean you can't have interesting sets, Ruth Sutcliffe turns the whole diving board into a giant bed. Bailey has not only included the induction scene but embraced it, and it's Christopher Sly, under the misapprehension that he's a lord, who's tucked up under the covers watching the play-within-a-play. Casting Nick Holder, an actor who's never been afraid to make himself look grotesque, as Sly, sets the tone for a scatological production, and Holder frequently pops up to steal the show in literally shameless fashion. Despite the 1940s Italian setting, Lisa Dillon's Katherina is entirely a modern-day ladette, constantly drunk, chain-smoking, spitting, vomiting and pissing on the stage. So her Petruchio matches her, his inappropriate wedding attire here consisting of him turning up topless and covered in marker pen, as if fresh from the stag do. Although, since he's played by David Caves, the production like the poster image is basically a series of excuses to get him to take his shirt off anyway.