Theatre review: Oil

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Once again I don't remember specifically booking a preview but it looks like the professional critics are in tomorrow.

Ella Hickson's plays have been steadily growing in size and scope, and Oil at the Almeida sees her take on not just a global issue but an epic story that spans centuries. In 19th century Cornwall, May (Anne-Marie Duff) lives on her husband's remote farm, a hand-to-mouth existence but she's genuinely in love with her husband Joss (Tom Mothersdale,) and the fact they can't keep their hands off each other makes it no surprise that she's pregnant. But when William Whitcomb (Sam Swann) arrives from America with a ridiculously generous offer to buy the farm as a UK base for his kerosene business, Joss turn him down and May can't forgive his lack of ambition. She steps out into the snow and on a journey that now takes on a surreal note. Because in the style of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, a few years pass for May, but many more pass in the world around her.

Theatre review: Photograph 51

The last time Nicole Kidman appeared on a London stage she famously got her neeps and tatties out; the sight gave an elderly critic an erection we've had to hear about for the best part of two decades. He's retired now, so I guess Kidman felt safe to return, with her pants on this time (better safe than sorry,) to play Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51. Anna Ziegler’s play looks at the race to discover the structure of DNA - although, in what will turn out to be a fatal flaw that consigned her to a footnote in history, Franklin never quite realises that it is a race. Soon after the War, she's working in Paris when a place at King's College becomes available. But she may have been brought there on false pretences as she's instantly taken off her work on protein: Dr Wilkins (Stephen Campbell Moore) wants her to help boost his own research into DNA, like pure theatrical Sanatogen.

Theatre review: No Quarter

Polly Stenham's first two plays made waves not just because of her age (she famously wrote That Face aged 19) but also because they punctured a popular image of well-adjusted middle class "normality." For her long-awaited (Tusk Tusk appeared back in 2009) third play the location has moved away from the suburban kitchens and bedrooms of her earlier efforts, but she hits her targets with similar levels of success. For No Quarter, designer Tom Scutt has configured the Royal Court Upstairs into a thrust, packed to the rafters with books, musical instruments and stuffed stag heads, the trappings of an upper-class rural life that's fallen on hard times. This remote manor house is where musical prodigy Robin (Tom Sturridge) was raised almost in isolation, and where he's now returned after dropping out of an exclusive music college.