Theatre review: An Actor Convalescing in Devon

Richard Nelson's An Actor Convalescing in Devon, about a Shakespearean actor who lost part of his jaw and soft palate to cancer and had to learn how to speak again, was written especially for Paul Jesson - a Shakespearean actor who lost part of his jaw and soft palate to cancer and had to learn how to speak again. The other elements of his story borrow from a variety of other sources and themes though, perhaps too many for a short monologue. Jesson's character, simply called The Actor, is waiting to board a train to Exeter and then on to a friend's country cottage for a long weekend. If he's going there to convalesce it's not so much from his physical illness though - while he was in hospital his partner and fellow actor Michael had a heart attack and, because he wasn't resuscitated quickly enough, suffered brain damage that left him confused about what was reality and what was a story he was performing in.

Stage-to-screen review: Lights Up - Sitting

Future Dame Katherine Parkinson's Sitting was staged at the Arcola two years ago. Although the credits acknowledge that it's based on Sarah Bedi's original production, and keeps one of the original cast members in Mark Weinman, this film for the BBC's Lights Up strand is a new production from Jeremy Herrin, with the playwright now also taking on one of the roles: Parkinson plays Mary, a recently-divorced mother of one with some unresolved feelings about her dead sister. Luke (Weinman) is unemployed and soon to be a father; though he keeps insisting he hates his pregnant wife, the way he talks about her suggests otherwise. Cassandra (Alex Jarrett) is an aspiring actress and seemingly a compulsive liar. Their monologues are interspersed with each other, each of them speaking to an artist, John (briefly seen played by Paul Jesson,) who's painting their portraits.

Theatre review: Coriolanus (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Season director Angus Jackson returns for the fourth and last of the RSC's Roman plays, and although Coriolanus is set earlier than the other three, designer Robert Innes Hopkins eschews the togas of the middle two plays, to match the modern dress of Titus Andronicus. In fact this also starts with a rioting gang in hoodies, and since it will actually play first when they all transfer to London, it annoyed me a bit that it'll look there like Blanche McIntyre copied the idea. Fortunately there was less to annoy me about the rest of the production, in which Sope Dirisu takes on the least likeable of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Caius Martius, later given the title Coriolanus after one of his many military victories, is a one-man Roman army, raised as such by his batshit bloodthirsty mother Volumnia (Haydn Gwynne.)

Theatre review: The Moderate Soprano

A strong cast headed by Roger Allam and Future Dame Nancy Carroll struggles to make David Hare's latest play feel like the finished article. A former chemistry teacher at Eton, John Christie (Allam in an embarrassingly ill-fitting bald cap) was a 50-year-old virgin when he went to the opera and fell for The Moderate Soprano. A barrage of gifts began the wealthy eccentric's courtship of the much younger woman, and eventually convinced Audrey (Carroll) to marry him and settle in his country home in Sussex. Today the name Glyndebourne is synonymous with opera but in 1934 the idea of building a small opera house in the grounds was the latest of Christie's bizarre grand schemes, his plan for an annual season a thinly-disguised showcase for his wife's modest talents. A Wagner fan, Christie looked to Germany for his creatives, and with the rise of Hitler some big names had found themselves out of favour with the Nazi regime.

Theatre review: Bring Up the Bodies

The second Mantel piece at the RSC's Swan, Bring Up the Bodies carries on the story of Thomas Cromwell (Ben Miles) where Wolf Hall left off. That play saw Henry VIII (Nathaniel Parker) saddled with a wife he's gone off and who can't bear him sons, and wanting heaven and earth to be moved so he can replace her with a younger model. He got what he wanted but at the start of Bring Up the Bodies his situation feels remarkably familiar. Anne Boleyn (Lydia Leonard) has produced the future Queen Elizabeth I but a son still eludes her, yet she continues to throw her weight around at court, blind to the potential danger. With Anne wildly unpopular, there's an opportunity to satisfy a lot of people's agendas by getting rid of her when the King's gaze starts to stray towards the silly, timid Jane Seymour. And having been instrumental in securing the second wife, Cromwell knows he has to be similarly useful with marriage number 3.

Theatre review: Wolf Hall

I haven't read Hilary Mantel's double Booker-winning historical novels about Thomas Cromwell (I wasn't too fond of her Beyond Black a few years ago, so wasn't tempted by her more recent literary blockbusters.) Theatre, of course, is always much easier to tempt me with, so the RSC bringing the court of Henry VIII to their smaller Swan stage was intriguing (and, even with the train journeys factored in, quicker than reading the books.) I'm watching each show on its own, so first up is Wolf Hall, in which we join Cromwell (Ben Miles) as the trusted, but still lowly, lawyer in the service of the Lord Chancellor Cardinal Wolsey (Paul Jesson.) We're a couple of decades into Henry's reign, which means he's unhappy about Catherine of Aragon's failure to bear him a male heir - and starting to look at alternatives.

Theatre review: Love and Information

Nikki Amuka-Bird, Linda Bassett, Amanda Drew, John Heffernan, Paul Jesson and Amit Shah are among the cast of 15 for Caryl Churchill's latest play, Love and Information. Almost as if she'd seen the Royal Court Downstairs' flair in recent years for lightning-fast scene changes and wanted in on the action, Churchill gives us essentially a fast-paced sketch show format. On what looks like the same white box, endless configurations of people and settings appear, to perform vignettes no longer than a couple of minutes at most, some lasting only seconds; a couple of them with barely any dialogue. The significance of some of the scenes is occasionally hard to pinpoint but overall a picture builds up of information in modern life: The demand for it (the opening scene is of Shah demanding a secret from Amuka-Bird,) the overload of it (he soon regrets asking,) and where emotions and individuality fit into a world made up of endless streams of data, both useful and useless.

Theatre review: Travelling Light

Only a few months after the rather good The Last of the Duchess, another new play from Nicholas Wright, Travelling Light. Or, as I couldn't help thinking of it, Cinematographer on the Roof, since it sees Antony Sher channel his inner Tevye. Sometime in 1930s Hollywood, film-maker Maurice Montgomery (Paul Jesson) looks back on the early days of cinema when he was still called Motl Mendl, a minor journalist trapped in the almost-entirely Jewish village of his birth, in an unnamed part of Eastern Europe. (Christopher became rather fixated with figuring out the precise geographical location and was planning to scour the programme for clues. I was happy to accept that the story's fable-like nature meant the location was deliberately nebulous.) There, as he tells it, he more or less single-handedly created the motion picture industry.

One of the reasons I was keen to see this was because Motl is played by Damien Molony, who (as of the 5th of February) will be the new male lead in one of my favourite TV shows, Being Human. Fortunately he makes for a strong lead, his character is something of an amoral charmer which Molony pulls off very well. On a shallow note he's also pretty easy on the eye, and when his bare legs appear in a couple of scenes, that's not a bad thing. Nice toes too. What? It's a thing. The supporting cast is strong although Sher comes uncomfortably close to caricature. The real problem is the play itself. Wright's conceit is to play out the story of movies in microcosm in this little village. So Motl is the fractious director, Jacob (Sher,) the local mill owner who bankrolls the films represents the producers and Anna (Lauren O'Neil,) the girl they both have their eye on, the starlet. A small group of locals asked for their opinion become the first focus group, and soon everyone starts to stick their oar in. It's a simple conceit, too simple to carry a two-and-a-half hour play. By halfway through the first act we've got the idea, by the second act it's been stretched well past breaking point. Jesson looks awkward in the half-hearted framing device, his occasional, unnecessary interruptions of the action by wandering in through a back door are pretty twee. It also leads to a very problematic ending: I fully appreciate that the end is a reference to the convoluted twists in exactly the kind of melodrama these film-makers were producing; but irony only takes you so far and this is the ham-fisted ending we're left with.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of amusing moments of gentle humour. But gentle is just it, Travelling Light is a pretty slight piece that feels lost on the Lyttelton stage. I found it a really odd choice of play for the National to be staging, with Nicholas Hytner himself directing. Funnily enough Christopher had the exact opposite comment, that he found it typical, light post-Christmas National fare. At the interval, though we both saw flaws and upsides to the play, Christopher seemed slightly more positive about it. By the end though we were pretty much in agreement that this was an idea that might just about carry a one-act play, but ran out of steam in a full-length one.

Travelling Light by Nicholas Wright is booking in repertory until the 6th of March at the National Theatre's Lyttelton; then touring to Salford, Leeds, Aylesbury and Newcastle.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.