Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare's Globe)

If A Midsummer Night's Dream is the Open Air Theatre's signature Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing feels like it occupies a very similar place at the Globe. I could definitely do with longer gaps between new productions - they do start to blend into each other in my memory and I sometimes wish for a bit more distance from the last one to let the next fresh take make its mark - but while some have been better than others the venue has never served up a completely duff one as long as I've been going there. Chelsea Walker's production doesn't buck that trend either: Not a particularly high-concept one apart from Sami Fendall's designs taking a lot of inspiration from the weddings the plot revolves around - a lot of white, floral displays and the musicians decked out as a wedding band, playing old standards that punctuate the comedy and sometimes troll the characters.

Radio review: Don Juan

Not for the first time, and to be honest I think it's unlikely to be the last time this year, Covid has caused the show I was due to see tonight to be cancelled. And once again I've turned to BBC radio drama for an alternative, and Robin Brooks' Don Juan, an adaptation of the first few cantos of Lord Byron's epic satirical poem. Byron's version of Juan (Matthew Tennyson) isn't a famed lothario, or at least not yet, but a beautiful but gormless teenager who proves irresistible to all the young women he meets, especially those with husbands or fathers who'd disapprove. So he first catches the eye of neighbour Donna Julia (Pippa Nixon,) unhappily married to a much older man, who seduces Juan and then gets caught with him in a bedroom farce when her husband returns. Juan flees the city and is shipwrecked, and found by Haidée (Dolores Carbonari,) who also falls for him - and this time it's her fearsome pirate father who causes them trouble.

Theatre review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The National usually puts a family show on one of its larger stages around Christmas but this year's offering winds up in the Dorfman; perhaps because, although it has its share of spectacle in Fly Davis and Samuel Wyer's design and Jamie Harrison's illusions, Katy Rudd's production relies heavily on old-fashioned theatricality and the work of its ensemble to bring its magic to life. Joel Horwood adapts Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, in which the favourite Gaiman trope of the witchy Maiden, Mother and Crone guard the borders between realities. Samuel Blenkin is the unnamed Boy who, in 1983, a year after losing his mother, has another encounter with death on his 12th birthday when he finds the body of his family's lodger. The man has killed himself after gambling away other people's money, and the traumatic event close to a place where the boundaries between realities are weak wakes something on the other side.

Theatre review: The Importance of Being Earnest

Dominic Dromgoole’s Classic Spring company was set up to present late 19th and early 20th century classics in the West End proscenium arch theatres they were written for, the suggestion being that’s something of a unique opportunity. While that might have been the case with some of the more obscure plays that opened the Oscar Wilde season, the concluding part is The Importance of Being Earnest, whose last West End revival wasn’t only three years ago, but in the same theatre, the Vaudeville. At the time I said the twenty-year gap I’d left since last seeing the play was probably about right given its ubiquity and familiarity, and I hadn’t been planning to return for this version. But the combination of Michael Fentiman directing and Sophie Thompson reclaiming the role of Lady Bracknell for actual female actors was tempting, and with a quiet August week on the horizon I decided to fill a spare evening seeing if some well-worn bon mots could feel fresh.

Theatre review: Sunset at the Villa Thalia

A playwright who has the same background as me - half-English, half-Greek - Alexi Kaye Campbell has dealt with a variety of themes, and now writes a play that looks at, or at the very least is set in, Greece. The subject matter of the military junta of the colonels in the late '60s and early '70s is a bit before my time and, while I wouldn't say it was a taboo subject when I was growing up, it's not something I was taught at school or know that much about. Not that Sunset at the Villa Thalia tackles Papadopoulos & co directly; Act I takes place in 1967, on the very day of the coup, but the setting is one where its influence is unlikely to be felt anytime soon: The island of Skiathos where young English couple Charlotte (Pippa Nixon) and Theo (Sam Crane) are renting a house from a local family for a few weeks.

Theatre review: The Tempest (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Although he's shown a lot of inspiration in his time running Shakespeare's Globe, Dominic Dromgoole hasn't been afraid of a cliché either, and so for his final production in the Swanamaker he directs The Tempest, a play dubiously seen as Shakespeare's farewell to theatre (a farewell so final, he co-wrote at least three more plays after it.) A decade or so after being ousted from the Dukedom of Milan, Prospero (Tim McMullan) has become master of a smaller domain: An island with only two other human inhabitants, his daughter Miranda (Phoebe Pryce) and his slave Caliban (Fisayo Akinade.) In all the years that he was neglecting his dukedom Prospero was studying magic, and it's with these powers that he plans to get it back: When the people who deposed him, including his brother Antonio (Brendan O'Hea,) happen to sail close to his island, he conjures a storm to shipwreck them into his power.

Theatre review: As You Like It (RSC / RST & TR Newcastle)

From a Shakespeare play that's new to me to one I'm very familiar with, As You Like It having been the first Shakespeare comedy I saw on stage in 1989, and the one that made me realise their humour can still work today. Accordingly it's also a play I can be very particular about, and have been known to get stroppy if I think it's been poorly served by the production. This year's RSC offering though comes with a promising pedigree: Maria Aberg directed my favourite Shakespeare of 2012, King John, and here she reunites with its leads, Pippa Nixon and Alex Waldmann, to take on Rosalind and Orlando. Rosalind's father, the Duke Senior, has been deposed and exiled by his younger brother Frederick. When she spots the mistreated young nobleman Orlando de Boys winning a wrestling match, he and Rosalind fall in love. Shortly afterwards they're banished, separately, to the forest, and by the time they meet again Rosalind is disguised as a boy - a subterfuge she now uses to test and toy with her lover.

Theatre review: Hamlet (RSC / RST & TR Newcastle)

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This production invites the critics in next week.

Although I'd like to approach every show with no preconceptions, some productions are easier to get excited about than others. I like Hamlet, and the cast the RSC has assembled, enough to warrant a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. But David Farr is one of the company's most prolific directors, and Jonathan Slinger has been an almost constant presence in Stratford for the last few years. It's hard not to feel as if the pair have been let loose on the "big one" having paid their dues, rather than because of any really exciting idea they wanted to explore. It's a feeling not helped by the fact that Slinger isn't an obvious match to the role at this point in his career - at 40 he's the oldest Hamlet I've seen, overtaking Simon Russell Beale who was 39 when he tackled the role. Having put my preconceptions on the table from the outset I will say that as the show approached I got more excited about it; the production photos revealed an interesting set by Jon Bausor, and the publicity suggested a particular focus on the fencing that gives the play its climax, and I was intrigued by how that conceit would work.

Theatre review: Richard III (RSC / Swan)

There's many legendary speeches in Shakespeare, which must be nerve-wracking for any actor. Most of them turn up well into the play, and clever choices by directors and actors can even sometimes make them take you by surprise. But Richard III's most famous line, "Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York" is the play's very first, so as the lead actor enters, much of the audience will be wondering how he'll deliver it. Some might even know the speech so well they find themselves muttering it under their breath, like a woman in the front row of the Swan did today. A few lines into the speech Jonjo O'Neill turned, smiled at her and said "Yes, that's it. You know it?" It set the tone for what kind of Richard we were in for: Having done his time as a member of the Ensemble^TM, O'Neill returns to the RSC as the star turn, to play the Duke of Gloucester as the consummate actor, playing to and flirting with the crowd.

Theatre review: King John (RSC / Swan)

When you go to as much theatre as I do, certain Shakespeare plays do keep cropping up. Two Lears in a year wouldn't be that unusual but two King Johns? I was excited when the RSC's new one at the Swan was announced last year, and booked straight away, even paying a bit extra for a front row seat since it's such a rarity (at the time I'd last seen it a decade ago.) Since booking, a smaller-scale production appeared much closer to home, so this is now my second King John of 2012. But even if the play's not quite Hamlet it still rewards getting to know it better, and this turns out to be a show well worth making the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon for.