Theatre review: Anna

On the one hand, it's disappointing to have a show at the National where cheap tickets are very thin on the ground; on the other, I can't complain if this is part of a new policy not to sell Dorfman side seats if they offer no view of the stage whatsoever. The reason you need to watch Anna head-on or not at all is that Vicki Mortimer's set is entirely behind a letterbox of sound-proof glass. This is because Ella Hickson's play is co-created with star sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, and making sure the audience hears, through headphones, only exactly what the creatives want them to hear is at the heart of the show. This is another show built on binaural sound, and the technology has obviously now progressed to the point that it can be made portable. And so everything we hear comes from the perspective of Phoebe Fox's titular character as she walks around her East Berlin flat.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night (National Theatre)

For most plays, having seen another production within four years would seem very recent, but the most popular Shakespeares come along a lot more often than that, and avoiding Twelfth Night for three full calendar years feels like an achievement - and one I was keen to make, because however fresh a director's twist on the story, there's only so much you can do to overcome familiarity. Realistically it would take a lot longer to forget a play I know this well, but under the circumstances this is pretty good going, and at least I break my run with a production I was looking forward to: The big selling point of Simon Godwin's production for the National is that Tamsin Greig plays a gender-flipped Malvolio. Now called Malvolia, she's housekeeper to the wealthy Olivia (Phoebe Fox,) the last in her family and as a result in a declared state of permanent mourning, any romance officially ruled out.

Stage-to-screen review: Richard III (BBC Hollow Crown)

What do BBC budget cuts look like? Geoffrey Streatfeild with some muesli on his face to show that Edward IV is poorly, that's what they look like.

It's been tempting throughout this second series of The Hollow Crown to see adaptors Ben Power and Dominic Cooke as using the re-cut Henry VI Part 1 and especially Part 2 as warm-up for the main event of The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses - Richard III, whether because of  Brobdingnag Arafat being cast in the title role or simply because it's always been the most popular play in the tetralogy. And while there's been some strong moments along the way to belie the fact that these are Cooke's first foray into directing for the screen, there's no denying that he's saved the flourish for the finale. With the exception of the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field, there's not so many wide open spaces as before, instead the "bottled spider" gets to work in claustrophobic rooms with a lot of blue filters (so blue at one point it looks like Barry Chuckle is wearing electric blue nail polish.)

Re-review: A View From The Bridge

You can read my original review here, of the production that eventually made it to #2 in my best shows of 2014 - a result only unusual in that most other blogs and reviews put Ivo van Hove's production of A View From The Bridge at #1. The original cast from the Young Vic's production has come along for the West End transfer to Wyndhams, led by Mark Strong as Eddie Carbone, the Brooklyn longshoreman whose tragedy is that he never recognises his own attraction to his niece Katie (Phoebe Fox,) even as it makes him bring his life crashing down around him. The production originally played in thrust, something Jan Versweyveld's design attempts to replicate by putting two banks of seating on stage, either side of the enclosed performance area; it's a successful recreation of the design, and even from a seat much further away than last time, I didn't feel the experience was lessened - after all, the effect was always one of making us distant, helpless observers of the inevitable tragedy.

Theatre review: A View From The Bridge

Arthur Miller imagined commuters using the Brooklyn Bridge and barely registering, let alone caring, that there were people living in the neighbourhoods around it. Hence the title of A View From The Bridge, in which Miller imagines the stuff of classical tragedy taking place in the cramped apartments of Red Hook. A mostly Italian-American neighbourhood, it will sometimes see families putting up illegal immigrants from Italy, fleeing desperate poverty and glad to find work on the docks, hoping nobody rats them out to Immigration. Eddie Carbone (Mark Strong) has just put up such a pair of his wife's relatives, brothers from Sicily. Marco (Emun Elliot) is a married man sending money back to his wife and children and hoping to return to them when he's made enough; but Rodolpho (Luke Norris) is single, entranced by the bright lights of America and determined to make his life there.