Theatre review: Richard II (RSC / RST & Barbican)

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of split ends and frizz.

After a year in charge of the RSC, Gregory Doran's first piece of programming finally rolls round, backing up a feeling that star casting is back to stay at Stratford where he directs David Tennant as Richard II. The great-grandson of Edward II, you'd expect family history to have made Richard fully aware that sometimes kings can be deposed, but instead he is steadfast about his divine right to rule, and does so capriciously. Banishing his cousin Bolingbroke is a bad idea, but worse is seizing his property once he's gone, to fund an Irish war. Bolingbroke isn't going to stand for it, and his return to England becomes a fully-fledged revolt. Faced with the fact that his power and even his life aren't as safe as he believed, Richard has to try and maintain both his crown, and the natural lustre and shine of his hair.

Theatre review: Narrative

If Anthony Neilson writes a play called Narrative, one thing you can be fairly confident about going in is that there won't be a traditional narrative on offer. Although the action does coalesce into a story as the play goes on and the characters form relationships, what Neilson and his actors are interested in is the way life itself can be experienced as a story, and consequently rewritten in hindsight. A mother (Christine Entwisle) channels her grief over her son's death into a petition to ban the drug that killed him; when new information shines a different light on events, how does it also change what her life has become? A young woman (Zawe Ashton) goes through a series of failed relationships; she changes her backstory about how her mother's love made her who she is, but the outcome of her relationships is always the same. And an actor's (Big Favourite Round These Parts Oliver Rix) success sees his life become as fake as the character he's playing on screen.

Theatre review: I Am a Camera

Cabaret returns to London next month but first up we get the play that inspired it, John Van Druten's I Am a Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood's recollections of his time in Berlin. In the suitably dingy space of Southwark Playhouse's Vault, designer James Turner has created a room in Fraulein Schneider's boarding house on a two-sided raised thrust - it doesn't come with any mod cons, but it does come with a three-piece band playing mournfully behind the walls. It's the room that Isherwood (Harry Melling) occupies at the start of the play, but his ailing finances mean he's about to move to an even smaller and cheaper room across the hall. Replacing him in this room will be another English ex-pat, Sally Bowles (Rebecca Humphries,) an aspiring actress with a fondness for all the wrong men. Over the summer and autumn of 1932 we follow their friendship, and the way they and their bohemian circle of friends react to the rise of the Nazis.